Identity Theft
by Random-Battlecry
Summary: A distress call from Second Plight, where time is changing drastically. If only a dying people was all they had to deal with, but when a harmless-looking girl enters their lives, the Doctor's changed pretty drastically himself. Ten/Rose. Now complete!
1. Chapter 1

**CHAPTER ONE**

It was an unusually tranquil summer morning, one which Adabade felt equipped to handle. It was less like the turbulent, storm-filled summers of recent years, and more like the long-ago gentle warmth of his youth. He leaned on his spade for a moment, ignoring the divots of Plight-dirt that clung to it waiting for somewhere to go, and thought longingly of those times, far off and unregainable. Things were so different now, these last few years. Things went so much quicker; the weather was atrocious; there'd been so many premature deaths, it seemed, men he'd seen grow from children to adults, failing and falling from life before their time. And all that fire falling from the sky: that couldn't be right, could it?

Well, he reckoned to himself philosophically. Things were the way they were. No use grumbling about things you couldn't change, was it?

At least he knew one thing for sure— at his age, he'd seen it all. Nothing could surprise him.

The blue box that appeared from nowhere, landing on and, for lack of a better word, squashing his squash, proved him dead wrong.

* * *

"Perhaps I should have some sort of warning attached, for when we materialize somewhere," said a rather worried Doctor, after having helped Adabade up and ensured that it wasn't, after all, a stroke or heart attack that made him collapse, but merely the sheer surprise of having a large blue box suddenly land in the middle of his garden. He thought of explaining that it was more than a big box, that it was in fact a TARDIS, standing for Time And Relative Dimension In Space, and further than that was far bigger on the inside than it appeared from this vantage point, but reckoned this unlikely to help the current situation.

"Like a back-up signal?" prompted his companion, holding onto his arm with one hand and pushing her blond hair out of her eyes with the other. "Beep beep? Beep beep?"

"I was thinking more of a klaxon, actually," said the Doctor, pursing his lips. "You know— WHHIRRP WHHIRRP WHHIRRP!"

"BWAA BWAA BWAA BWAA," suggested Rose.

"Perhaps," admitted the Doctor graciously. He tucked his arm, and Rose's hand, a little closer in to his side.

"Wouldn't that take the fun out of it?" she asked thoughtfully. "Certainly do away with the element of surprise. Not to mention, you'd think that grinding sort of 'vorp vorp' noise it makes would serve as some kind of warning anyway. After all—"

He let go of her hand and turned to her, somewhat taken aback.

"Is that what you think it does? 'Vorp vorp'?"

"Sounds like a mechanical cat being thrown out a very high window," said Rose, nonplussed. The Doctor tutted in dismay, and she grinned. "But I love it anyway."

Adabade finally took his hands away from his face and looked at them. "Are you two for real, now?"

"Yes, but only just," said the Doctor, focusing his attention on the aged farmer with almost frightening intensity. "Sorry to get off topic— are you feeling better? " He scarcely waited for the answering nod, being in something of a conversational hurry. "Good. Can I ask you a few questions?"

The farmer shrugged. "I suppose, if— "

"Good," the Doctor interrupted once more. "Now. Have you noticed anything strange about the weather lately?"

Adabade eyed him askance. "Strange as compared to what?"

"This is the point," the Doctor said earnestly, bending over slightly, hands in his pockets, "where you're meant to burst into fond reminiscence and mention how you don't get proper weather these days, not like when you were a lad." He dipped his chin downwards and eyed Adabade askance right back, competently.

"He means please," put in Rose. "He just skips that bit sometimes."

"Well, I allow as that's true," said the farmer carefully, leaning back against the wall of his shed. "It has been a good bit different these past years. Not like what I remember, to be sure. Colder for one, less rain. More fire out of the clear blue, that sort of thing."

"And the seasons?" the Doctor pressed. "Anything unusual about them?"

"A mite shorter," Adabade admitted, and frowned at them. "What's this about? Some sort of government thing?"

"Just one more thing," said the Doctor, skipping blithely over his question as though it were a chance to say 'please.' He pulled an object out of his pocket. "This is the sonic screwdriver, and it won't hurt you if you stay very, very still." Adabade immediately froze as the alien with the whirring sonic probe moved towards him, eyes wide; the Doctor pointed it at the farmer's frightened countenance for about five seconds, then withdrew it and stuck it back in his pocket. "And," he added, "it wouldn't have hurt you if you'd moved, either." He grinned suddenly, a bright, mad stretch of a grin. His pale face nearly split in two with the width of it. "We'll just be going now, Mr—"

"Adabade," said Adabade.

"Mr. Adabade. I'm the Doctor— this is Rose— thank you, you've been most helpful, et cetera et cetera—" He backed Rose away behind him as he walked off, still facing the bewildered farmer and chattering. "And—" He paused at last, and a look of serious contrition came to his dark eyes. "I'm sorry, I'm so very sorry, about your cucumbers."

"They was squash," said Adabade, but they were already gone and the potential for yet another squash joke went unfulfilled.

* * *

"And so, now?" said Rose, hopping along at the Doctor's side as he strode purposefully off along the plain. "Now are you going to tell me where we are? When we are? Why we are?"

"The planet of Second Plight, named for when Emperor Hadun realized he had to spend an entire year with just his mother-in-law for company, under his own law which dictated the penalty for shooting a duck— well, I say duck, more like a lizard but tastes the same, tastes like a duck, that is— that didn't belong to him. It was all an atrocious accident, but had the most astonishing— " He frowned. "Don't much like the word 'atrocious' actually. Stop me if I say it again, will you?"

Rose considered this just as much as it deserved. "What was the first plight?"

The Doctor gave a little mouth-shrug. "Politics. Now. Whenwise, a comparative time to your own, except they call it the Age of the Twentieth Pineapple. We're not, in fact, too terribly far away from the earth. You may have noticed similarities. Humanoid inhabitants—"

"That doesn't mean much. You've taken me billions of miles away and I've still seen humans." She poked him in the arm a few times. "You look a bit like one yourself."

"Still," he said, and shrugged. "Humanoid inhabitants, house-like structures, one sun, breathable air—"

"Squash plants—"

The Doctor stopped short and looked at her, mortified. "I did rather, didn't I? I know I should get a warning signal, but I suppose it won't do any good for gardens."

Rose laughed. "No, I mean— you did, but they were squash plants even before that."

"Were they? I was sure they were cucumbers. Ah well, that's too bad isn't it? Ruined a perfectly good apology by apologizing for the wrong thing. That'll teach me to be specific."

"So why are we here, Doctor? You never did tell me. And it's got to be something serious, the hurry you were in. I thought we'd spend at least another day on Half-Charm— "

"Don't blame me for that!" he protested. "How was I to know there would be a major political uprising just as we were sitting down for tea with the Prime Minister of Chiswick? Mind you, if it'd been real Chiswick, proper Earth Chiswick, like I thought it was, we'd have been stuck in good regardless. Have you ever seen anyone stabbed to death with knitting needles, Rose? Don't ever attend a Ladies Aid Society Political Meeting at which rum is being served."

"Doctor—" She tugged at his arm once more. "I really would like to know. When you pulled up that information, or report— whatever it was— on the TARDIS console— you got all serious. I'd like to know why."

He turned away from her and walked on. "I'm very good with time, Rose, really very good, mostly because I've had a lot of practice. Not everyone counts time the same, of course— there's really no cosmic clock, and not everywhere has day and night, or seasons or tides, or any of that sort of thing. In fact there's one place— I'll have to take you there sometime— where it is always Saturday afternoon just before the beach bars close. Fascinating how they discovered themselves in that state, especially without even working from a preconceived notion of 'Saturday,' nevermind 'afternoon'. And I can tell you for certain that the bartenders aren't overly pleased with always having closing shift and never being able to close, though Celestina says—"

"Celestina?" she prompted immediately.

"Yes, Celestina. She's a bartender. She, er, tends the bar." The Doctor lifted one hand and scratched just behind his ear, looking slightly bemused and a tiny bit guilty.

"I see," said Rose.

"Anyway, Celestina says the tips make up for it somewhat, seeing as everyone's drunk almost constantly, just as a matter of course, you see, and a bit loose with their spare change— but I've sidetracked myself, and admirably so. The point is, Rose, Second Plight also works on a time very similar to Earth's own, complete with 24-hour cycle and everything. At least, they used to."

"How do you mean?"

"For the last seven years, they've steadily been losing a bit more daylight every evening. They're down to about a five and a half hour cycle now, between dark and light, with no sign of improvement."

"They're—" Rose wrinkled her forehead in thought. "They're losing _time_?"

"Yes. And there's one other thing, something that makes it even more serious, Rose." He turned to her again to emphasize his words. "The inhabitants age differently than you do. It's the night, their sleep-cycles, that ages them, that moves them along in their timelines, and not the passage of time itself. They're running out of life, Rose, and very quickly."

"That old farmer— " she started.

The Doctor pulled the sonic screwdriver from his pocket once again, and clicked it through a few setting still it whirred in rhythmic bursts, the significance of which was lost on Rose, a language only he could understand. Until, of course, he chose to tell her.

"About thirty years old, I should reckon," he said quietly.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two**

Leaving the TARDIS where it was for the moment, they meandered down the plains till they found a path that led to town. It wasn't much of a town, thought Rose, who was trained not just by London but by a whole slew of alien civilizations, past, present and future, that delighted in building structures that reached optimistically for the sky. The Doctor usually found a way to liken these dramatically stretching spectacles to the human race and their propensity for sometimes ridiculous optimism ("The Human Race!" he would say, caressing the words with his voice so it sounded like he was head over heels in love with the whole lot of them, which was not far from the truth. "Ridiculously optimistic! Hah!") regardless of who they were built by.

The Doctor seemed to have something of a love-hate relationship with humans, Rose reflected; he was certainly reminded of them an awful lot, and they'd been touching down on Earth almost exclusively for several trips now. Even Chiswick, as mentioned by the Doctor, was meant to have been the Earth version. This particular excursion, to the planet of Second Plight, had come as an alert on the TARDIS console— code cerulean.

"What's that?" she'd asked.

"Oh, it's a sort of greeny-blue," the Doctor had replied absentmindedly, for which she'd smacked him.

"But not mauve?" she'd persisted, and the Doctor had grinned briefly at her.

"Not yet," he'd said. "Do you want to wait till it is?"

"Nah," she'd said after a moment's thought. "If you show up in the nick of time too often, sort of takes the surprise out of it."

To which the Doctor, somewhat randomly, had replied, "Knew a Time Lord named Nick, once—" Of course his name wasn't really Nick, as it turned out, but rather Niccohadratus, but it had made Rose laugh anyway, which was probably what the Doctor was going for.

Now, though, they marched on the city that was not a city, smiling and nodding left and right at the population, who were out and about in the few daylight hours and seemed disposed to be friendly.

"Do you suppose any of them know what's going on?" Rose whispered to the Doctor, getting on her toes and stretching to speak into his ear.

"Doubt it," he replied, stooping a bit, obligingly. "If anyone suspects, it'd be someone older, someone who's been around to notice the change. Trouble is, there's a fine line between old enough to remember and, well, old enough to remember, and still be of help to us. Think of that farmer, only thirty years old. Imagine the ones that have been around forty, fifty years."

"I guess," said Rose hesitantly, "life doesn't begin at fifty after all."

"No," said the Doctor. He was not smiling as he looked around them at the population, and Rose sobered in turn, feeling guilty for joking at a time like this— at a place like this. She tucked in closer to his side and he glanced at her, then gave a sudden brilliant smile.

"Good thing we're here to give them their lifespans back, eh?"

She grinned back, relieved. "What would the universe do without you?"

"Us," he corrected firmly, and before she could react, went on. "Now, what we need is someone who's been paying attention. And not only that, someone with some sort of weather records. They must keep records, don't you think?"

"Like a meteorologist?" she said.

"Exactly like," he said with an emphatic nod. "Question is, where do we find one?"

They'd reached the middle of the town, arranged on an octagon with narrow streets stretching away on all sides, some lined with shops but most with houses. The Doctor paused and looked about himself, studying the flow of foot traffic and any available signs. Rose was distracted by the fact that they appeared to use two-headed horses to draw their carts.

"Cor— Doctor, look!"

"Easier to get them to back up if they can see where they're going," the Doctor murmured absentmindedly, not looking. "Bet _they_ don't need any kind of signal— ah! Rose, what would you say to a newspaper shop?" He turned to her and grinned. She tore her eyes away from the equine spectacle and grinned nervously back at him.

"Er, 'hello' I suppose."

"Nonsense!" he erupted, with cheerful indignation. "You say that to the newspaper boy. 'Hello, newspaper boy,' et cetera. To the _shop_, you say, 'Have you got any back numbers, specifically the weather section?' Come on." He grabbed her hand and tugged her down one of the lanes to the left, heading for a sign which, with a bit of squinty-eyed scrutinizing, she was eventually able to read. The letters were ornate and difficult to decipher, but it did indeed advertise _Newspapers_.

"Simple as that?" she marveled. "Really?"

The Doctor looked up at the sign, then back down at her, frowning thoughtfully. "Yes, really. Well, almost. Why shouldn't it be?"

Rose scoffed. "Well, it certainly doesn't fit the pattern, does it?"

"Rose Tyler—" He put his hands on his hips. "Are you suggesting that I deliberately go out of my way to find unnecessarily complicated and indeed ridiculously convoluted and round-about ways of accomplishing tasks and doing things?"

"In a word—" she hinted delicately, and he grinned at her again, like he couldn't help it, and pushed open the door to the news shop.

"After you."

The shop smelled of dust and ink; the Doctor breathed in deep with every sign of satisfaction and appreciation. "Nothing quite like a printing location," he said, shoving his hands in his pockets and proceeding to nose around. "Think of it, Rose— the origin of news, of rumors, of words themselves, propaganda and outright lies, the more entertaining the better— can't say I agree with all of it, myself, especially as to why the papers always seem to have an extensive portion dedicated to gardening, gardening's got to be self-taught I always say, no sense in writing out long diatribes about the proper way to trim your hedges, best just give the public their own trimmers and let them work out which is the sharp bit—"

"Doctor—"

"Then again there's probably a knack to it that I will simply never get a handle on, because other than roses in the Cloisters and that one Bat-Tree in the belfry I've never really had what you would call a green thumb— still, there's always the funnies—"

"Doctor—"

"Rose, do you smell barbeque?" The Doctor turned about quickly, frowning and sniffing, to observe Rose smiling apologetically at the middle-aged man who'd emerged some monologues ago from the back and who was now smiling perplexedly at both of them. He was covered in charcoal smudges, on his face and hands and his once-white apron, and had a wide pad of paper in one hand.

"Sorry," he said politely, "I was just doing the illustrations. For the, er, gardening section."

The Doctor froze for one enigmatic moment, then leapt to action with a suddenness that obviously startled the little man, who took a step backwards in self-defense from the lanky alien who now advanced on him for the purpose of shaking his hand.

"Hi!" said the Doctor. "Right! Illustrations! For gardening! Wonderful, definitely something we wouldn't get along perfectly well without, I don't think! Nice to meet you, I'm the Doctor and this is Rose, tell me— you wouldn't happen to keep back issues, would you? Only we're doing research."

The man blinked a few times, pleasant but confused, and detached his hand from the Doctor's enthusiastic grip. "Research? Well, I'd be happy to help you, of course, but— you know, of course, that we keep pretty quiet around 'ere. I can't imagine what you'd need to do research on."

"The weather, actually," said the Doctor promptly. "I understand you do have weather here?"

The newsman made a modest little face and admitted that they did.

"Brilliant!" said the Doctor. "That's just what we're looking for— weather! I suppose you do note it down in the papers now and then, eh?" He waited with beady eyes and bated breath for the illustrator's reply, which came in the affirmative and garnered much appreciation from the Doctor.

"Wonderful! So, shall we come in the back, or wait right here for you to bring out the back issues? Only I'm afraid we're going to have to look at several years' worth," he added.

"Several years' worth?"

"Yes, I'm afraid we're only really interested in very old weather. Older the better, say— maybe over the last seven or eight years? Would that be possible?" The newsman opined that it would and, still looking quite bemused, meandered back into the rear section of the shop to dig for back issues. The Doctor pulled a face and turned to Rose with a beleagured sigh.

"Now there is a man I pity."

"I shouldn't wonder. I pity him too, having to haul out all those old papers for you."

"Us," the Doctor corrected her once more. "And that's not what I pity him for. Can you imagine, living for five hours from morning til night and putting out a newspaper for each day? It must make him loony, trying to find things to write about. I'd be stark raving mad by now, scuttling around to people's gardens, asking for tips, trying to come up with something funny for the comics on such a tight deadline—"

"I hope that's the most of his problems," said Rose, pushing her hair out of her eyes and sighing. The Doctor turned a serious look on her, dark eyes staring with something unfathomable until she returned his gaze at last.

"Well, that's the problem, of course," he admitted. "It isn't."

* * *

Rose slapped the last of the papers down on the counter, and followed it down to rest her forehead on it. "I've still got print swimming around on the inside of my eyelids," she said indistinctly, muffled by the stacks of paper.

The Doctor was seated next to her, one elbow on the counter and his chin in his hand. He'd fished his black spectacles out of his pocket at the commencement of their investigation, and they were steadily slipping down his nose, bowing to the inexorability of gravity. "Who'd have thought," he said, somewhat dreamily, glancing at the doorway to the backroom to make sure the newsman wasn't listening to them. "An honest-looking little man like that, making up all these things just to write about?"

"Can't really blame him." Rose picked herself up and sighed, framing her face in both her hands and keeping her eyes closed. "Dinky little place like this, nothing ever going on— just like you said. Finding something to write about must be awfully hard. Still— wish we wouldn't've had to wade through it, when all's said and done."

"At least he stuck to gardening," said the Doctor, somewhat regretfully. "Falsified information on how to grow carrots is one thing, but imagine if he'd tackled interplanetary politics, Rose. Take this one, for instance—" He picked up one of the earlier editions, near the bottom of the stack. He had to wrestle it out of its place, and the remainder of the stack promptly collapsed in on itself, sending newspapers slithering and skating across the counter and onto the floor. The Doctor eyed the tide for a moment, nonplussed, then went on regardless. "This is from seven years ago, around the time that the daylight started shortening. 'Mine Closing Due To Energy Loss.' All about the energy shortage in this vicinity, specifically on the next planet over, Tel-Athra. It was a long hard fight involving lots of people, unions versus the environmentalists— sacrifice a few environmentalists for the good of the economy, the unions thought, which would have worked except the environmentalists themselves were forward thinkers and had guns." He clicked his tongue. "Environmentally friendly guns, of course, but guns nonetheless. This article must have had lots of political connotations— it's just as well for him he didn't start making stuff up about that."

Rose tilted her head. "How do you know he didn't?"

"I was there," admitted the Doctor frankly, and Rose smiled.

"I should have known."

"Never saw the media coverage of the aftermath before," the Doctor went on, digging through the slew of papers to find another one. "This one's from a few weeks later. 'Environmentalists Claim Guns Were Meant To Have Real Bullets— "We're Not Kidding," Says Leader. 'We're Really Serious About The Environment And Nobody's Going To Stand In Our Way."'" He twitched his nose and sniffed. "They were trying awfully hard. Not their fault that the guns turned out to shoot nothing but little flags that said, 'Bang.'"

"Oh really? And whose fault was it?"

He looked at her and said nothing, but grinned.

"Ha! Knew it."

"Anyway, the mine ended up staying open after all. They found an alternative energy source, it seems."

"And the environmentalists?"

He squinted at the papers, which chose that moment to buckle to the call of gravity and slide into his lap. "Started a street theatre group, I think. At any rate, I was right. The weather has been steadily changing for the worse as the days have been getting shorter. Very little rain, the crops are drying out, it's getting colder—" He scrabbled through the pile of paper on his lap, found one and held it up to show her. "And there's been fire falling from the sky."

It wasn't a photograph— they didn't seem to have cameras here. But the artist's rendering, done in charcoal, was very detailed and rather graphic. Rose looked at the flames, at the terrified expressions on people's faces, and shivered despite herself. It wasn't just the terror— it was the ages of the people captured in the illustration. All of them ruthlessly pulled out of youth, past the prime of life with nothing more than an acknowledging nod, and deposited swiftly into old age, moving quickly to death before their time.

"Doctor, what's going on? What's happening here?"

He shook his head slightly and adjusted his spectacles, catching them just before they gave up and slid off his face. "I don't know, Rose. But I'm going to find out."


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three**

They left the little news shop in considerably worse condition than they'd found it. The newsman was terribly polite about it all, but Rose was sure that he was heaving a sigh of relief as they went out. She couldn't really blame him— the Doctor did tend to leave a mess.

And she was getting as bad as he was, she reflected as they emerged onto the tiny dirt street. The Doctor was reminiscing about another political upheaval he'd been embroiled in years before, one which he hadn't seen covered in the news and which he was glad about: apparently the Zygonian Empire had an extensive Mafia-like set up. Rose wondered how often he featured in local media, on how many planets in how many solar systems, and for how many "upheavals." Then it occurred to her to wonder how many of them _she_ was in as well, right there by the Doctor's side.

Far too many, probably. It made her a little proud, that thought.

"It was undoubtedly best if I got out of town," the Doctor told her, meandering on with his hands in his pockets. "Well, out of country— off-planet would be the ideal solution, of course, but the TARDIS was in hock— oh-_ho_, she never let me forget that one, let me tell you— and with the assassination organization— I like that phrase, don't you? Fun to say. Assassination organization's procrastination. Vacation destination." He looked inordinately pleased with himself, and undoubtedly was. "At any rate, Murtaugh offered to cut me a deal. I would invite his mum round for tea, and he would call off the hit. So then I said, let's just let Zygons be Zygons—" He paused and looked at her with an expectant expression; she laughed at this more than at his awful pun, smacked his arm playfully. He grinned loosely, loopily at her in return.

"Can't believe it of you," she told him. "You're not exactly one for pursuing the peaceful option, are you?"

"Oi! Now, now, Rose Tyler, I object! I'm nothing if not peaceable. It's other people who keep landing me in situations where I'm forced to take action— stop laughing, Rose." She didn't. She couldn't. "I hold to my ostensible reputation as a man of peace," he said serenely, pulling her closer. "To coin a phrase, I make love, not war."

She snickered once more and sputtered to a halt. "I didn't think you did either."

"Oi," he said, more gently this time, and was undoubtedly gearing up for some strong counter-argument when there was an interruption.

"Excuse me."

They both turned and looked at the source of the voice: a girl, or rather young woman, a few years younger than Rose herself. She was slight, not more than five feet tall, with wide brown eyes and a long black ponytail drooping over one shoulder. She was also holding what looked like an old-fashioned camera, square and boxy and black with a gaping eye-like lense, and an impressive set of buttons ranged on top, which she gestured at them with.

"I do hate to interrupt, but do you mind if I take your picture?"

The Doctor and Rose exchanged glances.

"What for?" he asked, eyebrows drawn together to express some consternation. The out-of-place camera was of concern to him, but the girl smiled a little, quite charmingly.

"You're visitors to this place, are you not?" she asked. "We so rarely get visitors— we like to remember them."

The Doctor stepped forward, stooped a little and squinted at her. "But you're not from round here yourself, are you? Accent's foreign— visiting the Colonies?"

The girl nodded. "Came over on the _Decatur_, quite a while ago. I've made Second Plight my home, though. It seemed best."

The Doctor considered this, nodding a little; he sniffed violently and stood back up, stepping backwards and putting one proprietorial arm around Rose, who glanced down at his hand on her shoulder and then, in self-defense, refused to look at him. "Very well, then," he said. "Say cheese, Rose."

"Cheese," she said, grinning a little tightly at the camera.

"Camembert," said the Doctor, grinning a little tightly himself. The girl raised the camera to her eyes, and smiled at them from behind it, pressing three buttons in quick succession. There was a blinding flash of light, from which the Doctor and Rose emerged blinking rapidly and still grinning in the aftermath. The girl danced away, trilling a thank you over her shoulder, and the two time travelers turned to each other. Rose put a hand up to hold the Doctor's own in its place around her shoulders.

"Listen, I've been meaning to talk to you—"

"Some other time, Rose! Just now we've got a mystery to figure out." He patted her hand with his other, unwound himself from around her, and invited her to take his arm, which she did with a sigh. "If we're going to give these people their lives back, we're going to have to sort out what— or who— is taking it from them in the first place. Makes sense, doesn't it? Good. I like to think of myself as making a little sense now and then."

"Breaks up the monotony," said Rose. He glanced at her sharply for a moment and then relaxed into a grin.

"Rose Tyler, sometimes, I swear— if I didn't know that you knew I was fantastic—"

The word made her smile, and he tugged her close for a half-hug, for just a second. It had been just on three months since his regeneration, and he could tell she still missed the old him once in a while. Despite the fact that he was doing his best to break her in to the new one, that was— of course, he was handicapped by the fact that he was still trying to break himself into the new one, as well. Easier to be a tour guide when you've visited a place before, he told himself ruefully; otherwise you end up just gesturing around the landscape and saying, "Look at that!" a lot.

"That's why you have to keep proving it to me, is it?" she murmured into his jacket. She was talking about more than just his basic fantasticness, he could recognize that.

"Absolutely," he said with utmost sincerity, then pulled away and yanked her after him down the street. "First thing's first!" he said.

"I thought we already did the first thing?"

"Alright, then, second thing's second! We need to talk to someone who might actually know what's going on."

"And who might that be?"

He turned to her very seriously, still moving down the street but now walking backwards. "I'm afraid we're going to have to locate the oldest man on Second Plight."

She waited, but he didn't elaborate. "And that would be— who?"

"I've no idea. That's why I was afraid."

She shook her head at him, and they walked on.

* * *

Several streets away, the young woman with the camera was fiddling with it. It wasn't that it was broken; it wasn't that it was balky. It was that it had considerably more functions than that of a camera, and she was trying to get it into Mode II. She had to press five buttons at once for it to boot up, and her fingers were rather small this time around; she was having some issues.

Eventually she managed, however, mostly by dint of using her nose for the last button. She muttered arcane alien curses under her breath.

But it worked.

There was a familiar wavery feeling in the pit of her stomach, like she'd been swallowing heat waves, or had a desert horizon blooming to life down there. She smiled and leaned back against one of the buildings. It was a very dizzy sensation even for someone who knew what was happening; and for someone who didn't, it was going to be downright startling.

She'd settled on the man for the transfer; it had been quite a while since she'd been a man, and this one looked like he'd be fun to be, all loose length, slimness, and that broom-like shock of dark hair. She put her hands on her stomach and said her final goodbye to this body. She'd had some good times in here, but in the end, she always had to move on.

At her feet, hidden carefully behind a garbage bin where she would know how to find it, the camera whirred and clicked rhythmically, settling in for a good, productive Mode II.

* * *

"The thing to remember about accents," the Doctor was saying, "is that they're dead giveaways for all sorts of things, not just where you're from. How you were educated, what social class you're in, who you grew up with, whether or not you were afraid of clowns as a child—"

"What, seriously?" Rose turned to him in confusion.

"Children who are afraid of clowns," said the Doctor dogmatically, "almost invariably develop a distinct lisp."

"You're makin' that up."

He paused for a moment. "You're right, I am. Sounded good, though, didn't it?"

She put her hands on her hips, and the Doctor winced. That was never a good first step. "Oh, yeah. Especially since we're in dire need of knowing whether or not someone was frightened of clowns. Comes as a real disappointment, this does."

"No, but what I'm saying is that you really can tell quite a bit about a person just from listening to them talk, and it's not just the words they say, either. Take that young woman with the camera, for instance. I'm guessing she's originally from Targen, which is years away. So what's she doing here? Why was it 'best' that she make this her home? And why did she lie about—" He stopped suddenly, in his tracks and in his speech, and stood very still. Rose had carried on a few steps more but turned back to him as soon as she realized he wasn't beside her; the look on his face alarmed her and she sprang to his side.

"Doctor, what is it?"

"Rose, I think—" His breath came fast, came faster, until it all went out of his lungs in a rush and he doubled over, put both hands over his face, and gave vent to an enormous sneeze. It propelled him backwards a few steps, and Rose rocked back the opposite way from sheer surprise. It also gave her the giggles as soon as she realized nothing life-threatening was going on, so when he stood back up and looked at her with considerable cunning in his eyes she wasn't looking at him to observe it, but was too busy snickering into her hands.

"God, Doctor! You had me scared for a minute there."

"Sorry," he said, not particularly contritely.

"That was just— bizarre!" She dropped her hands and looked at him. "Come to think of it, I've never heard you sneeze before."

He appeared to be thinking about this for a moment. "Well, my nose got irritated, I suppose. It does happen to the best of us. Rose." He tacked her name on at the end with a singularly smarmy grin, which she narrowed her eyes at. "Now, don't mind me, just— tell me, where were we going again?" In response to her look of surprise, he added, "The sneeze just knocked it right out of my head."

"We were going this way," she gestured over her shoulder, "to see if we can locate the oldest man on Second Plight."

He considered this, and nodded. "Right. Lead the way."

She gave him another narrow-eyed glance, but obeyed.

The body of the Doctor stalked after her, tripping slightly over its own long legs.

* * *

The first thing the Doctor was aware of was a brilliantly blinding flash of light. It shot to the back of his eyeballs and danced merrily with half the synapses in his brain, causing confusion and mass panic there as the ends sparked and a hellish headache was begun. The second thing he was aware of was also a flash of light; as was the third, and the fourth, until gradually his vision began to clear and he realized that he was in fact lying on the ground, staring into the lens of a camera, which was taking pictures in rhythmic bursts. He squinted his eyes shut and rolled away from it, which solved the issue of the flashes, but did nothing to alleviate the headache.

So he reached up to hold his head in a familiar gesture, hands automatically sliding into his exuberant hair, stopped, and frowned. The hair was not so exuberant; the strands were thicker, coarser. Longer.

He slid his fingers down his face; except it obviously wasn't his face, because it felt tiny. And so did his fingers. He held his hands in front of his eyes, glanced from one side to the other, observed his hair where it now hung down across one shoulder. Scarcely daring to breathe, he looked straight down at his shirt-front.

"Oh dear," he said quietly.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four**

There was definitely something under the shirtfront. That is, something more than he was used to. Something more than should have been there.

Come to think of it, there was something distinctly odd about how he was feeling in general. He already had a sneaking suspicion niggling at the back of his mind as to why this was, but he wisely decided to stand up and ascertain the way of things before allowing the niggling suspicion to become a roaring panic.

He stood up, and ascertained the way of things.

Well, for one thing he was a good deal shorter than he was used to, he recited to himself— the world was higher, or he was deeper in it. Add it all together: hands, hair, height, unexpected cleavage, and there was little room for doubt that he was— not to put too fine a point on it— not as usual.

He hadn't ever been a— well, strike that, there was that one time. He hadn't been a woman for _ages_; and it took him a few steps to get back into the stride, as it were. On top of which his legs were much shorter than he was used to. All in all, it was like the most awkward regeneration he'd ever undergone; though it wasn't actually a regeneration, he reminded himself sternly. He wasn't stuck like this. Not at all. He'd simply go out and find Rose and retake possession of his body—

The thought struck him that somewhere out there, the erstwhile possessor of this body was likewise struggling to get control over unaccustomed proportions. He had a grin and a soft little chuckle over that, until he thought of Rose— _Rose_— with— whoever the girl was. The girl that was now, to all intents and purposes, the Doctor.

Blimey, this one could get confusing.

Right. He just had to get his thoughts sorted, that was all; they were a bit confused on account of the— what was it, anyway? Some sort of biological transmat— a biomat— he thought the name over and gave a mental shrug. He'd call it that, anyway, no use referring to the bloody thing as a camera.

On the thought, he leapt for it. It was still clicking and whirring away to itself in the corner. He picked it up and shook it, which didn't help the situation much but aided in working off a little of his mounting frustration. On closer inspection it seemed that "biomat" would work for a handle as well as anything; there was no button marked reverse, or anything that even looked like a reset. Obviously the designer hadn't meant it to be particularly user friendly. As far as he could tell without the sonic screwdriver and the TARDIS laboratory, it was a jury-rigged transmat application wired into an old-fashioned camera that, instead of taking a picture, took the mental statistics of the subject, copied, and downloaded into the desired cranium, thus effectively transferring consciousness without all the fuss and mess of an actual brain transplant, which were technically illegal anyway— not that that kept people from doing them, however, which was a bit sad, really, because the kind of people who were willing to take the risk were probably stupid enough to actually need the procedure done.

He congratulated himself. He'd done quite well, even without the sonic screwdriver and the TARDIS. It was like old times, saving the universe with a kettle and some string.

He looked in the lens, and the lens looked back at him, black and void. "Congratulations to you as well," he told it, tripping over his own voice, and reckoning he was going to have to adapt his personal pronouns. It was such a girly voice. "Not often that someone gets the jump on me quite like this."

The biomat made no response; but he'd expected that, really. It was a machine, a means to an end— and, he reasoned, the girl had left it here for a purpose: so she could come back and find it. Obviously, the end had yet to be achieved.

Perhaps she was a serial body snatcher, biomatting from person to person when she got the whim or when it got her out of tight spots. The Doctor considered this for a bit; it made sense, certainly. Difficult to hold someone in a prison if they could turn into one of the guards, and a habit like this could void the question of aging altogether. He was reminded again of his own regenerations, which were not quite as useful— or disposable— but certainly were more honest.

Honesty— that was something, wasn't it? This girl, this odd body-jumping creature was anything but truthful and straightforward. But was it just her bad habit that she was trying to hide? Or was there something else she wanted desperately to escape?

Musing on this, the Doctor carried the biomat with him and began to traverse the street; stopping only to stare, bemused, at his reflection in a windowpane for five minutes straight.

* * *

"Where are we going now?"

Rose turned back to the Doctor's familiar shape, frowning slightly. "Same place we were going before."

"And that is?"

"To the mayor's house. Jonquil at the news shop said he would know who's the oldest man." She squinted at him, and smiled despite herself. His hair was sticking straight up in front, he was starting to get the slightest of five o'clock shadows, and he was looking unusually perturbed; a bit, she thought, like a colicky baby. It was the expression he'd had when he came upon her and Sarah Jane having a laugh at his expense, and though she wasn't sure why he was wearing it now instead of his usual exuberance at the thrill of adventure, it was a fond memory, that time with Sarah Jane. "Are you sure that sneeze didn't rupture your brain, Doctor? All the old synapses firing a little off kilter?"

"Nonsense, they're brisk as a rocket." He frowned at her. "Can't we worry about this later? I believe we've got more important things to do. Don't we?"

She stopped, faced him fully, and folded her arms. Was this some sort of test? "I don't know. Do we?"

He appeared to be thinking about it. After a moment, he came up with, "I left the kettle on, in the ship."

She blinked, raised her eyebrows. "The ship?"

"Yeah, the," he gestured over his shoulder with his thumb. "Space ship."

Rose shook her head slightly. This was odd, even for him. Then again, she reasoned, who was she to say? As he was fond of telling her, he was a new man. As well as she'd gotten to know the old him, this new regeneration still escaped her sometimes. Like— like the licking. This Doctor was a man who licked doors, among other things. What was it for? She might never know.

Unless she got really drunk, sometime, and asked him.

"You mean the TARDIS?" she suggested gently, just to clear things up. His face tightened momentarily, as though he'd heard a word he wasn't quite familiar with, and then relaxed again; he nodded with more enthusiasm than he'd shown in some time.

"Yeah, definitely. The TARDIS. We should go back— to the TARDIS. I think I left the kettle on in the, er— the TARDIS."

Rose glanced back over her shoulder, then back at him.

"There's something you're not telling me, Doctor, isn't there?" He looked startled. "I mean— there's something going on in your head, and you're not letting me in on the secret. You're just bein' all inscrutable an'— textbook enigmatic. Not that that's strange," she added. "God knows I should be used to that by now. But just— tell me if I'm right." She waited, and he considered for only a moment.

"You're right," he said at last. "You're definitely right. When you're right, you're right, and this time you're right. I've got something going on in my head, that's God's own truth. And I think we ought to go back to the TARDIS, so I can get it straightened out. In my own way. In my own inscrutable— textbook enigmatic— way." He finished at last, having dragged the sentences out one at a time like prisoners to be presented for her inspection, and tacked on another grin to make it more palatable. She eyed him warily, then relented and sighed.

Suddenly she seemed to be come more resolute.

"Right," she said determinedly. "Well, I've been meaning to have a chat with you as well. Come on."

The Doctor would normally have made an uh-oh sort of face, one that indicated he knew full well that a "chat" was one-sided and generally unpleasant; he would have followed this up with some comment about her remarkable if only occasional similarity to her mother, and fended off her retaliations with long-winded diatribes about genetics and heredity and how ridiculous it was for her to try and refute an accusation like that when it was so obviously merited.

This time, however, he said nothing.

Rose now began to suspect seriously that something was wrong.

* * *

The Doctor was now quite sure that something was off. It wasn't just that the girl had stolen his body and landed him in this petite and generally useless one; no, though that was quite enough of a problem, it wasn't just that by a long shot. It was also that, as he had been saying to Rose before his shape was altered without permission, the girl had been lying about something.

And that something was her arrival on the planet of Second Plight.

Which was why he ended up taking a detour to the shipyard. It wasn't difficult to find the way; in a small town like this, the docks were highly important and therefore clearly marked. He wended his way through the streets, following signs and thinking a bit fretfully about how much slower it was, walking with legs this short. What was he meant to do about it, though? Not much more than he was doing already.

If his suspicions were correct, and the girl had indeed landed just this morning (he was quite sure the _Decatur_ was on the list of incoming craft he'd seen posted on the TARDIS readout, just prior to their arrival themselves on the unfortunate farmer's cucumbers— no, squash, wasn't it? A terrible tragedy. The Doctor liked squash) then why had she lied about it? There was something odd about it— something she was trying to distance herself from.

And if there was something she had to get away from, then there was a vulnerability to her; one that the Doctor would have to find and exploit to get himself back.

Funny, that; usually he was fighting for planets, for civilizations, for companions, for the TARDIS, for Rose. It was a rare thing, to be doing all this for himself. Of course, it wasn't all for him— there was also the question of his original purpose in coming to Second Plight. A quest he would have to return to as soon as he could.

As soon as he was over five feet tall again, he promised herself, and then shook her head. Personal pronouns really were difficult little buggers. He, she, it. _Me. I. The Doctor._ How would he ever cope if he actually regenerated into a woman one of these times? Probably not too well, she told herself ruefully; though possibly she'd deal with it better than Rose would.

Now, there was a thought that was best saved for another time.

Ah, there it was— the _Decatur_. Newly arrived, certainly, as it was being washed down from the detritus of near-origin space travel and refueled. The Doctor stood and grinned in some triumph at it, contorting his— her new face a bit to get the hang of it; and tried three times to put her hands in her pockets before realizing that she didn't, in fact, have any.

A voice behind him said, "Hey!"

She turned to find out who was calling, and was accosted by a large, burly man who gripped her immediately by both elbows and began to hustle her towards the gangplank. She struggled quite fiercely, and eventually the man simply picked her up and carried her.

"Oi, oi! OI!"

"Shut _up_, woman," the burly man said from between his teeth.

"Oi—" the Doctor started again, then changed her mind and gave a resigned, "Oh, well. Better than being called a wench, I suppose. Alright. It's a fair cop— I'm a woman. What are we going to do about it?"

"For starters, Alice," said another new voice, a strange and cool voice from the interior of the ship, "we're going to have a little discussion on what 'payment on delivery' actually means."

The Doctor, set once more back on her own two feet— or rather, on someone else's— said, "Alice? Blimey. Never been called that before, either." She scratched the back of her neck, and gave a particularly rueful smile. "An entire day of firsts," she said. "Now, how's that for a vacation?"


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter Five**

They were walking peacefully along when the Doctor said, "Hold on a mo," and leapt headlong into a side alley. This was so much more like his regular self that Rose immediately felt more cheerful about things and began framing in her mind how she was going to go about opening the conversation she wanted to have. "You're so different," seemed a likely horse to bet on; only, she'd said that to him already, hadn't she? Several times, in fact. Each new adventure revealed something indescribably _apart_ from the man she'd known, and yet she could tell, still, that underneath it all was the Doctor, same as he ever was, same as he would always be.

He was now banging things around a lot and muttering to himself.

"Doctor? You alright?"

"Aaargh!" was about all she got in return.

Alice was having difficulties. It wasn't just learning how to use this Doctor's ridiculously lanky alien body, it was trying to fill whatever space he normally filled: both on the actual physical plane and also in his companion's mind. On top of which the specially adapted transmat he'd used— back when he was a she— had now gone missing.

He had a sneaking suspicion that he hadn't hid it well enough. He hadn't hid it well enough, and that skinny alien _bugger_ had taken it with him. Her. All this time, and he still hadn't quite got the hang of the niggling little issue of personal pronouns—

Well, it had been so long since he'd changed gender, he could hardly be blamed for that, could he?

He gave up at last and emerged blinking back into the dimming sunlight; the nighttime that came so quickly on Second Plight was hovering just over their heads. Alice looked up at the sky, so much closer now that he was tall, and breathed in deep. New body, new person, and soon a new planet.

"Right, lead the way," he ordered Rose, gesturing with both hands down the street. "Back to the TARDIS, get 'er fired up, get on the way."

Rose glanced down the street in the direction he'd indicated, then took a few sidling steps the opposite way. "It's, um— back this way, Doctor."

He immediately swung one of his hands to indicate that way, as well.

"Of course. That's what I meant."

Rose walked on a few steps, then turned back and took his hand; looking studiously down at their entwined fingers she failed to see the look of confusion and sudden surmise that he was giving her.

"Doctor, are you feelin' alright?"

"Fine!" he erupted. "Perfect! Never better! Actually, I've got a little bit of a headache." He did, too; the transmat always tended to mess a few things up in there, not to mention the hassle of learning how to work a brand-new body. But it was worth it— oh, was it worth it. Alice could think of a few hard times the transmat had gotten her out of, and to think of not having it was enough to send a sick shudder down his spine and through the pit of his stomach, which really didn't help at all. He put one hand over his gut and gave vent to a slight burp, ignoring the look of mirthful shock on Rose's face.

"Well, like you say," she said, tugging his hand, and the rest of him, along with her, "rude and not ginger."

When at last they were standing face-to-face with the TARDIS, Rose waited for him to open it and let her in; but again he only gestured her forwards. Shrugging, she lifted her key on its chain around her neck and bent over to insert it in, not bothering to take it off first. She was always afraid of losing it, and then where would she be? Intent on her business, she didn't see the look of utter skepticism the Doctor was giving the TARDIS, which already was giving vent to a slight hum even as the two of them stepped over the threshold.

"Sounds like she's glad to have us back again," said Rose, blithely misinterpreting what the real Doctor would have known was a warning sound. The real Doctor wasn't there to know, however, and Alice was a bit busy coming to terms with the inside of the TARDIS.

"Wow, it's a bit—"

Rose glanced around the by-now familiar and perfectly normal surroundings. The TARDIS was home to her now, far more than her mum's flat in the council estates, and though she was sure she would notice anything that was too totally off, still the Doctor knew the TARDIS inside-out and backwards.

"What's wrong? I don't see anything."

"—bigger on the inside," muttered Alice, looking around with slightly wounded eyes. His initial skepticism hadn't paid off; and despite the fact that a working ship was better than a non-working ship, still, he hated to be wrong about anything. In something of a daze he walked towards the central console and trailed his hands over a few of the buttons, pressing lightly. The ship responded by burning his finger.

"Ow!"

Rose rushed up to him.

"What is it, what's happened?"

"Bloody pile of junk— sparks everywhere! Why don't you keep this thing in better repair?" He could tell by the look on her face that he'd said something indescribably odd, because she was looking at him as though he'd grown another head. "I mean— me? Why don't I keep this thing in better repair? Could do with a bit of oil, it could— extra flammable— and a carefully-touched match—" He glared meaningfully up at the TARDIS.

"Doctor—" Rose took his hand in hers and examined his burnt finger carefully, while she chose her words. "You're not actin' like yourself. There's something going on, and if you would let me know what it is, maybe I can help." She looked into his face, searched his eyes with her own, seeking— what? Whatever was wrong, she wanted to fix it. She wanted her Doctor back; he'd changed just so recently, and she didn't think she could take it again, not this soon.

Alice, meanwhile, was in difficulties. Clearly the young woman adored this Doctor, whoever and whatever he was; but what was the situation? Reciprocated or not? Consummated or not? Ill-fated, widely-hated, Kiss-Me-Kate-ed— he shook his head abruptly. A few of the synapses had still not linked up properly. He was having a bit of trouble thinking straight. All he knew, with sudden certainty, was that if he was not careful, the girl would figure it out. She must know the Doctor very well, traveling with him as she did; and he'd hit enough wrong notes over the last hour or so to make her very, very worried indeed. Distraction was in order. Diversion.

He cleared his throat.

"Er, Rose— wasn't there something you wanted to talk to me about?"

A diversion he'd aimed for, and a diversion was what he got. Rose stepped back from him immediately, face flaming, and folded her arms in what he recognized as a defensive position: she wanted to keep herself free from hurt, but was expecting to be harmed, somehow, no matter what she did. Alice added it all up in his mind: the unspoken conversations he'd seen between them during the brief moments they'd been observed, the hand-holding, the hidden looks, and now this. No doubt about it, _something_ was going on. Whether the two of them knew it or not.

Just his luck, to get landed in the middle of unrequited bleedin' love. As if things weren't complicated enough.

"Don't you want to get on our way first?" Rose prompted. She couldn't believe she was asking him that. Here he was, willing to sit down and talk about whatever she wanted to talk about, and now that the moment had come she was— what? Chickening out? Backing down? _Coward_, she told herself fiercely. _Never going to get anywhere with an attitude like that!_

"Certainly!" said Alice, gratefully. "Just fire 'er up, if you please, and we'll head off into the wild blue yonder— or— not— " He stuttered to a stop in response to the look she was giving him. Clearly, the woman was not his personal chauffeur, not that he'd ever seriously considered the possibility in the first place. Great. He turned and looked at the insanely complicated console, which glowed brightly for a moment, a warning to him: _keep off_. Great.

Just great.

"Never mind that now," he said, gritting his teeth and turning back to Rose. "We'll have a bit of a chat, and then we'll rest for a while, and then we'll see about—" _Finding alternative means of transport, something that it doesn't take five hands to operate_. "Then we'll see what we'll see."

Rose twisted her fingers together, and shifted her weight from foot to foot. There was no turning back now; no time like the present; no gain without pain, she reminded herself, a whole series of cliches that her mum used to be fond of telling her when she was little. That was before, of course, she got old enough and determined enough to go after everything she wanted— then her mum started telling her to slow down. She hadn't, though, had she? Which was why she was where she was, standing here on an alien planet in an alien ship. With an alien.

"It's about when we were on New Earth," she said.

Alice, with a moment's hesitation, gave a mildly interrogatory sort of, "Oh-mmm?" and fit the Doctor's face into something approximating a pleasant smile and hoped this was the proper response. Rose half-smiled back at him and went on.

"When Cassandra was— when I, that is, when I—" she swallowed hard. "When I kissed you, it didn't seem as though you— responded much."

_Aha_, thought Alice. _Bugger. I hate being right._

"Well, that was just _circumstances_," he said meaningfully, without conveying what meaning exactly he meant. Rose considered this.

"Well, I mean, I sort of thought you'd, you know— push me away. I was actin' sort of strange, you said, and obviously wasn't myself, so it almost seemed like taking advantage, to let me cling on to you that long." She got it out in a rush, and the Doctor's face stared back at her, baffled. It wasn't what she really meant to say, of course, but, yes: she'd come up to the starting gate and backed all the way round to the finish line. It was a roundabout way of achieving her objective, amounting to emotional manipulation, and she hoped devoutly the Doctor wouldn't see through it.

The Doctor apparently couldn't see much of anything; he was simply staring at her.

"And then back on Earth, when we were havin' that conversation about Sarah Jane, you came within a split second of saying 'love.' 'Imagine watching that happen to someone you love,' you were about to say, and you stopped cold." She tried to breathe deeply, regularly, evenly, sure in her depths that she was about to start hyperventilating if he didn't say something. "It just seems a little obvious to me, Doctor, an' I thought we'd better have a talk about it so it didn't get— awkward or something." Too late. He kept staring. She sighed; his inscrutable alien unresponsiveness could get annoying at times. Probably if she were a Time Lord and wore a funny hat they wouldn't have this problem. "So what I'm gettin' at is— Doctor, is there something you want to tell me?"  
It wasn't going to work. She'd been doomed from the beginning.

The Doctor, however, looked very pensive for a few seconds, raising one hand to his forehead; then he opened his mouth as though he were going to speak, bent forward suddenly and gave another violent sneeze.

A muffled, "Ouch!" came from him.

Rose looked down at him, still bent over and rubbing his nose. "Are you alright?"

"I think I'm allergic to this bloody ship," he said nasally.

There was something definitely wrong. "Doctor, I think you ought to go to the medical bay and run a scan or something." She tried to help him stand straight again, but he was still too preoccupied with his nose. "We need to get this sorted out. You're actin' very strange, and I think maybe there was something on that planet— maybe you got infected, some weird alien virus or something—" She succeeded finally in pulling him up and looked him square in the face, trying to give weight and gravity to a rather ludicrous situation that, nonetheless, seriously had her worried. "I think we need to know."

Alice panicked.

"Nonsense," he said, and the Doctor's voice came out a bit squeaky when the body was tense. "I'm just fine, Rose, just fine and dandy. In fact, the real problem is—" Rose was determined. Alice was still panicky. There was only one way out.

He lunged forward and put his mouth— the Doctor's mouth— on hers. He'd misjudged his weight and both of them fell backwards against the console. Rose yelped at the pain in her back and pushed him off a little; readjusted herself and grabbed his tie and pulled him back again, hands in the Doctor's hair, arms around his neck. Alice retreated into his own consciousness and decided that, whatever the situation on New Earth had been, exactly, Rose had no room for complaint, the little hypocrite.

Anyway, the goal was achieved: Rose was nothing if not distracted.

Everything was going swimmingly when he suddenly had to sneeze again.


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter Six**

The Doctor, resigning himself to disappointment, observed that the ship was slightly larger outside than it was inside, and therefore just a container, not a home. Not that she planned on staying in it long, anyway— though with the looks she was getting from the two men, now being joined by their comrades to march her into one of the interior rooms, perhaps it wasn't going to be left up to her.

It was a working ship, no doubt about that. Concrete floors, cargo bays, sweaty, greasy men with stained clothes and dirty fingernails. Machinery and wires, cafeterias and dented metal spoons, day-old sandwiches in plastic wrap. Every so often, a logo that struck her as vaguely familiar: an elongated mauve oval with a brilliant yellow center, and words that she couldn't see from this far away. Evidently her proper body wasn't the only one who needed glasses.

She was conducted into a room marked Foreman, and seated quite forcibly in a hard, squeaky chair.

The second man, cleaner and less sweaty than the others, seated himself across the desk from her, and adjusted his nameplate fastidiously. It read, simply, _Prosser_. The Doctor squinted at it, then squinted at him.

"That's your name, is it? Just 'Prosser'?"

"Very funny, Alice." The overseer remained unperturbed. The Doctor, however, gave a series of vicious blinks.

"You know," she said plaintively, "I'm not sure I like being called Alice. Makes me feel as though I've suddenly been thrown a banana I'm unable to catch." Prosser showed signs of impatience now, tugging on his collar and clearing his throat, and the Doctor sat up straight, plucking at her shirt and wishing she had a jacket to adjust. If she had a jacket to adjust she'd probably still be in her proper body. Or, at least, be warmer. "Never mind that, we'll leave it for the present, er— what's this about payment on delivery?"

"It's a little matter of what you owe the company for your safe conduct here." Prosser adjusted his nameplate once again, despite the fact that it hadn't, in fact, moved. "I presume that your business on this planet has been concluded satisfactorily, as you anticipated. A credit chit will suffice. Payable to me, of course."

The Doctor widened her eyes, shook her head. "Sorry, business wasn't as brisk as I thought. My pockets are empty." She frowned down at her clothes. "At least they would be if I had any pockets. What kind of person doesn't have pockets? Useful things, pockets are, keep all sorts of things in them and then, when you've a need, _voila_! There they are to hand. I _wish_ I had pockets."

"Whilst you sit there chattering, young lady, we load up to disembark once more for our destination. As you know, landing on Asiltensia was an aberration, not in keeping with our traditional schedule. Once we leave here, we'll be spending yet another year in orbit, and won't be setting down again till we have need."  
The Doctor's eyebrows shot up. "Asiltensia? I forget, what were we doing there again?"

"Picking you up, if you recall. I gathered there was something there you were rather anxious to get away from."

"I'll bet there was," said the Doctor darkly. "Fine! I think I recall now. I bought passage from Asiltensia, to here, on your ship which was not supposed to set down on Asiltensia but did, to pick me up and hopefully make your reverend self a little extra money on the side as your paycheck from— where is it?"

"Tel-Athra Mine Company," said the foreman from behind gritted teeth.

"Right, Tel-Athra Mine—" the Doctor, paused, blinked rapidly, and carried on a bit absentmindedly. "Clearly your paycheck wasn't— nearly enough for— a man of your— blimey,  
_really_ Tel-Athra?" She stuck her hand in her hair and succeeded only in getting her fingers tangled. "Ouch. Only, Tel-Athra Mine Company, that's the one that nearly shut down seven years ago, isn't it?"

"It's nothing to you," said Prosser, standing up. "What you should be concerned about, in fact, is what you're going to pay me with."

The Doctor looked up at him for a moment, then leapt likewise to her feet. "Well, we'll just have to sort that out, won't we? Let me think. I'm completely penniless, I doubt I'd do very well working in an environment like this, and you don't strike me as the type to play chess for it." She scrutinized him. "Though perhaps poker. No, I never was very good at poker. Don't have the face for it." She poked herself on the chin. "Definitely not anymore. Now. What else do I have to offer?" She thought about it a moment longer, then gave an experimentally seductive wriggle and burst out laughing. "Right, right, never mind, let's not go there."

Prosser was starting to turn purple. "This is all a big game to you, is it?" he hissed. The Doctor sobered somewhat.

"Nonsense! You try having your body stolen and then get hijacked onto some shabby little ship and told you're expected to fulfill someone else's bargain and then tell me it's all a game— not to mention I've got at least five hundred things running through my head at once and this brain isn't quite equipped to deal with them all. Not to mention that the fate of the planet hangs from my hands and Rose is off somewhere with someone else in my body and who knows what _she'll_ manage to get up to without a responsible brain present—" She stopped and stared in consternation into the middle distance for a moment, then took a deep breath and looked at Prosser. "And none of this matters a toss to you, of course, because it doesn't concern payment. Well, think on this. If you let me out, I'll go track down the original owner of this body for you and we'll swap and then you can let your righteous judgement settle down on the correct person. Alright?"

Prosser put his hands on the desk and leant forwards. "You honestly believe I'd let you go? After all the trouble you've been?"

"Trouble? How've I been trouble? I came right back here to the shipyards and you just picked me up, didn't you?"

Prosser scowled. "It's the principle of the thing. Now." He squinted down at the Doctor's petite hands, still clutching the biomat. "What's that?"

The Doctor looked down at it likewise. "Camera," she said.

"Doesn't look like a camera to me."

"Well. It is one." The Doctor clutched it a little tighter to her body. "And I'd offer it to you if I didn't think it might come in handy some day soon. I think I'm going to need it."

"You're not in a position to decide what to offer and not offer. Everything you have is forfeit and will go towards paying me back." Prosser stabbed at a button on his desk, the door opened, and two burly men came in, taking the Doctor by her arms. She glanced up at one, then at the other.

"Surely this isn't necessary? I mean, I'm five feet tall and about a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet. What'm I going to do, whip people with my hair?"

"You've escaped once," said Prosser grimly. He strode around the desk and took the biomat from the Doctor's hands, holding it up and turning it this way and that. Almost absently, the foreman said, "We're going to see that it doesn't happen again."

* * *

Being jogged along the corridors as her legs weren't quite long enough to keep up with the strides of the much taller men, the Doctor caught another glimpse of the logo she'd been unable to make out. No doubt about it, it was that of the mining company. She _hmm_ed to herself thoughtfully, then glanced up at the men.

"Boring, is it, working on a ship like this? I mean, no culture for one thing."

"We get a paycheck," rumbled the one on the left. "It's worth it."

"Certainly, certainly. Paychecks are always nice." The Doctor cleared her throat. "I've never gotten one, but I've heard tell. Very nice indeed. Tell me, though. Did you have a nice time on Asiltensia?"

"Not particularly," said the one on the right. "We didn't leave the ship."

The Doctor clucked his tongue in sympathy. "What a waste. Especially considering you spend so much time in orbit. Tell me, how long have you been doing trips like this?"  
The two of them glanced at each other over her head, and she tensed slightly. But they were only figuring out the length of time, not deciding to do something painful, and after a moment the one on the right said, doubtfully, "This is the eighth trip we're going out on. I think."

"And are these jaunts a year long every time?"

The one on the left snorted. The Doctor jumped in surprise. "Couldn't hardly do it any shorter time. Wouldn't do any good, would it?"

The Doctor leapt on this, throwing caution to the winds. "Why wouldn't it do any good? What are you doing?"

But this was a little too much conversation for the space-addled men to take, and they reached the door of Alice's room without saying anything else. Once deposited in it, she glanced around and reached the conclusion that, though they weren't going to let her go, she wasn't going to be quite a prisoner either. The room was low-grade standard, uncomfortable and certainly not aesthetically-pleasing but not a cell, either. She walked to the bed, with its half-inch thick mattress, and sat down with a sigh.

There was a small mirror over the wash-basin opposite; she looked herself over with a baleful eye. Alright, so it wasn't too awful of a body to be stuck in, as bodies go— but it wasn't hers, was it? She was quite comfortable with the idea of thirteen regenerations, but when it came to actually being in a body that wasn't at all hers— a _used_ one, no less— well, it was beginning to irk her just a bit. Come to think of it, there was something decidedly odd about this body; she squinted once again at her reflection, but there was nothing she could see that would set off any alarms. What was it?

It suddenly occurred to her to wonder who this body really belonged to; who'd been born to it, in it, of it. Whose parents it resembled. Where it was supposed to be. And what was that person doing, now? Stuck likewise in someone else's body? How far did it go, how tangled was this web?

She dropped her head into her hands and sighed. She was meant to be saving the world, but the world could surely wait while she had someone else's existential crisis, couldn't it?

The sound she'd been half-hearing all this time, however, was the engines running; and she put the crisis off for another more convenient time and went to see about finding a way off.

The workers on the ship had evidently met her and were not surprised at her presence, because apart from a series of grunts they made no attempt to stop her from wandering here and there. She responded with waves and friendly grins until one of the younger ones took it the wrong way; then she had to settle for waves and determined scowls. It made her think of the time she'd spent once on a planet called Evan's Defeat— an entirely matriarchal society, men were completely disposable and had no rights whatsoever: couldn't own property, couldn't vote, couldn't hold a job, had no choice in naming the children, and weren't allowed any say in who they were given as partners. It had made the Doctor slightly uncomfortable and rather delighted Rose until she settled down and took in the seriousness of the situation.

Oh, _Rose_, out there on her own with just his stolen body for company— she'd be fine, she told herself firmly. She'd see right through the body-snatcher and not be taken in by his charm. No problem. She'd be fine.

The ship seemed to be arranged around a central point which she was having a bit of trouble getting to. She kept walking around the curved hallways and corridors, always looking for the interior door; but the entrance to the center of the ship continued escaping her; until she got the idea of going down.

There was yet another burly worker manning the elevator. He glanced at her.

"Got permission to go here?"

The psychic paper would have come in handy, had the worker looked like he could read. The Doctor gave her best innocent blink.

"I talked to Prosser himself."

Which could mean anything, of course, it wasn't a lie, but the worker wouldn't know that, would he?

The worker frowned at her.

"What about?"

Right. Time to lie. The Doctor took a deep breath, held it for a second, and then clapped her hands over her face and sobbed into them.

"Hang on, hang on, hang on!" said the worker, alarmed. He hit a few buttons on the wall console, and turned back to the unexpectedly sobbing female who'd infiltrated his elevator. "Don't cry now, dearie!" He patted her on the shoulder and the Doctor twitched and cried harder. "Don't— don't do this! Don't— I can't stand to see a woman cry—" They'd reached the lower floor. The door opened. "So please," said the worker desperately, "do it somewhere else."

The Doctor advanced out of the elevator, glancing this way and that through her fingers. As an afterthought she turned back to the worker, who was doing his best to get the doors shut so he could hasten elsewhere and leave the crying girl behind where she wouldn't contaminate him. "Thanks! See you later— elevator operator." She gave a helpless giggle just as the doors slammed shut.

It was quieter down here, people-wise— but just on the other side of a steel door, something hummed like a swarm of giant bees. The Doctor advanced and hit the red button just on one side of the door (she never could resist a red button, that was part of what got her into such messes all the time, though she would deny it with her last breath) and it slid open with a screech.

The Doctor sniffed, looked at it. "Needs oil," she opined to herself quietly, and then she stopped talking for a moment because she was trying to figure out what it was that lay just inside it. It was huge, whatever it was. It was round and metal and enclosed in a room that was a good hundred feet across. There was a sort of grid, and just underneath it was a pulse: energy, as yet unreleased.

It was the largest tractor beam she'd ever seen. It just wasn't switched on yet.

This was what the ship was built around, a sort of intergalactic version of a hitch. The Doctor put a hand in her hair, looking at it with her mouth slightly open, and this time when her fingers came away with strands tangled in them she was too distracted even to say, "Ouch." A tractor beam this size must have tremendous pull, and, obviously, a definite purpose; you didn't built things like this to cart a trailer around after you, that was for certain. What would a mining company want with a tractor beam this size? Gravity mining wouldn't be discovered around these parts for another hundred years or so.

And, for that matter, why was the _Decatur_ setting down on Second Plight when it belonged to Tel-Athra? Shouldn't it have gone to the other planet for supplies? Unless—

Unless it was closer to Second Plight, because it was—

Oh.

_Oh_, she was clever, regardless of what gender she happened to be. In fact, it was quite possible that being female had sharpened her up some.

The Decatur was closer to Second Plight because it was using the tractor beam to pull the sun off course, thereby granting increased solar power to the Tel-Athra Mining Company, who would have closed down without an additional power source. _Ha!_ All this time, and once she had all the pieces, look how quickly she was able to figure it out! The Doctor congratulated herself busily. Rose would have been proud— Rose _would_ be proud, as soon as the Doctor fixed things and got back to tell her about it. It was a neat trick.

Only they didn't realize— they couldn't realize— the effect this was having on Second Plight's inhabitants. Second Plight's inhabitants didn't realize it themselves; they were too busy living and getting old and dying, just like they always had, to understand that it was happening much faster than it used to. The Doctor paused, hands stuck in her hair, and looked about herself wildly. A solution to everything— where was her deus ex machina when she needed one? No doubt about it, this ship was going to have to go.

By the sound of the engines, they'd made it off the ground and were now powering up and through the atmosphere. She clutched her hair tighter. She'd have to do something, and quickly, because riding a crashing ship downwards for a hundred miles or so was much preferable to riding a burning crashing ship with screaming people down while it passed through the thousands of miles on the way back to land.

Once again, she wished she had pockets; complete with sonic screwdriver; or some of Ace's Nitro-9; or at the very least, a rock.

But what was the use of being the Doctor for all this time (and space) if it doesn't teach you to cause a little havoc with your hands? When the occasion calls for it, that is.

When the warnings went off, she'd made it back up to the ship proper and was strolling with her grease-stained hands tucked behind her back. She glanced around.

"That's what the TARDIS needs," she remarked to no one in particular. Workmen ran here and there, panicky and stressed. "Make people sit up and take notice. Great big bells going off." She sat and worked on a blueprint in her head for hooking the Cloister bell up to a tannoy, with loudspeakers outside, and rode the ship downwards, complacently.


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter Seven**

Rose waited patiently till the Doctor stopped sneezing, which he did, eventually, and looked up at her red-faced, eyes watering. Then she presented the mug to him, with a doubtful smile.

"Tea?"

He looked about to accept, then turned away for another sneeze and collapsed onto the grating. He'd been doing this when she went to bed last night, and she eyed him worriedly.

"Were you up all night, sneezin'?"

Alice said nothing, but muttered a pained growl at her and pinched his nose. He was actually crying now, and worried that his newly-found nose was going to fall off. Curse the Doctor, anyway, for landing him with damaged goods! There must be something about this body that he was allergic to. This had never happened before, of course, but when you live the life of a body-snatcher you've got to be prepared for all sorts of things.

Rose seated herself next to him, cross-legged, and reminded herself sternly not to bring up last night to him. Whilst she was doing this, her mouth opened without her permission and, "Um, Doctor— about last night—" came out.

"Sorry," wheezed Alice. "But if I'd have let you keep kissing me, I'd just have ended up head-butting you anyway."

Rose blinked rapidly. "Yeah, I know, I mean— thank you, for cuttin' me off like that."

"No problem." Alice waved one of the Doctor's hands and gave a weak cough. He was hating this body more and more by the moment, not least the reaction it had had to Rose last night. It was subdued, undoubtedly, but also there, and as the resident brain it was nothing if not frustrating when you were too busy sneezing to pursue other interests. Was his life going to be like this? No, it was not, he told himself firmly. Soon as he got the transmat back, he'd be in some other body. Some other, better, less annoying body.

The sooner, the better, he cliche'd to himself sternly, and stood up with a new sense of purpose thrilling through him and making him sneeze. Rose stepped forward, still looking concerned and ready to help in any way possible, and he waved her back with one hand, pinching his nose with the other.

"Right," he said, nasally, "the thing to do is to go back into the city and look for an answer."

Rose looked perplexed. "An answer to what, exactly?"

"Life," said Alice, waving his free hand. "The universe. Everything, really."

The Doctor's companion folded her arms. "In't that a book?"

Alice sighed harshly, and sneezed. "It's important— nay, imperative, that we figure something out. We came here for a purpose, Rose—" Albeit one he wasn't particularly interested in. "—and we can't leave without results." He did his level best to look dynamic and inspiring, looming over the shorter girl, looking down on her with someone else's dark eyes. The fact that he had to keep swiping at his nose didn't help, but he reasoned to himself that one can't have everything.

Although, one was certainly going to try. The clever little transmat was out there somewhere, and Alice was determined to find it.

He got Rose out of the TARDIS by dint of promising breakfast, and was leading her slowly through the streets, hunting for familiar alleys where he might have misplaced the transmat, when there was the sound of a steady roar, growing in intensity and proximity. Rose clutched at his arm.

"Doctor, look!"

"Eh," he said, irritably, swatting her arm away. Was that a familiar shape just underneath that box, there? He dove for it. No, he found, it was something quite different, something justifiably left behind, something much smellier. He tossed it away and gagged.

"Doctor!" said Rose, again. Alice grumbled to himself that she seemed always to be saying that. She didn't seem likely to stop, however, and as he still wasn't paying her any attention she resorted to the expedient of grabbing his arm and hauling him bodily out from behind the alien garbage bin. "Look," she said, urgently, and pointed into the sky.

He looked.

"Oh, God," he said.

"I thought you might be interested," said Rose, looking him over with suspicious perplexity.

The good ship _Decatur _was roaring towards the city, streaming flame behind it and shooting sparks the size of cricket balls. It was— just barely— still under the control of the pilot, but bucking and yearning to be free to crash on its own time. Second Plight's gravity was slightly more giving than that of Earth, but it worked on the same principle nonetheless, and there was no doubt that the ship was going down.

Alice became aware that Rose was staring at him, as though waiting for him to say something. He wracked his brain for what it might be— what would the Doctor say, in this situation? What would the Doctor do?

"Er," he said, "cor. Blimey. Gosh." He waited. This was apparently insufficient, for Rose only shook her head and grabbed him by the hand.

"We really need to figure out what's going on with you," she said. "It'd be nice if you'd put a little effort into it. Don't you want to go and investigate the crash?"

"Er," said Alice, who didn't, "no, I think it's better if we just sort of— hang back— in case of— explosions—"

But Rose knew the Doctor better than he did, and was already pulling him bodily towards the shipyard.

* * *

The tannoy was calmly advising everyone to strap themselves in, and everyone was haphazardly trying to obey. Grown men were fighting for empty seats as though involved in a massive and potentially death-dealing game of Musical Chairs— a sort of Russian Roulette derivative, mused the Doctor to herself, striving to keep her balance as she walked down the hallway and, mostly, failing. It was easier to stay upright in this body, because the center of gravity was closer to the ground and she didn't feel like she was going to topple over like a tree; however, she also missed her own long arms, with which she could have spanned the hallway and gained stability that way. As it was, she was tossed this way and that according to the vagaries of the wounded ship, but she still advanced.

Men rushed by her, running to any safety they could find or invent. There were shouts from the kitchen as a few of them tried to shut themselves in the freezing compartment. The Doctor grinned to herself, tongue curled up to the roof of her mouth, and walked on.

"'The boy stood on the burning deck, whence all but he had fled,'" she recited to herself. "'Twit.'"

The door was, helpfully, still marked Foreman. Rather unhelpfully, it was locked.

It was at times like this, she reckoned, that she really missed the sonic screwdriver. She glanced around herself for something to substitute, but found nothing. She refused to let this sort of thing stand in her way, however, and a few kicks and a hurt foot later, she'd broken the glass window that made up half the door.

"Ridiculous to have a glass door on a space ship anyway," she commented, "never know who might break in."

Reaching through and undoing the lock, she swung the door open to reveal the foreman himself, Prosser, strapped in obediently and looking furious.

"Oh, hello!" The Doctor waved, cheerfully, and had to grab onto the door with both hands as the ship gave a shuddering jolt.

"You!" said Prosser, spitting fire. "You're responsible for this!"

"Well, yes, I am!" The Doctor stumbled forwards to lean on the desk. "But it's nothing more than recompense. I suppose if I'd come to you and simply asked you to stop pulling the sun away from its rightful planet, you'd have said _Oh yes, sorry about that, right away! _Hmm?"

"You interfere with us because of our purpose?" said Prosser, looking slightly bemused.

The Doctor absently felt for any pockets that might have spontaneously grown in the last hour. "'Course I do. It's a terrible purpose, and completely wrong, and you've got to be stopped. Why else?"

"I thought it was a personal thing," said Prosser, closing his eyes briefly. "You said from the moment you stepped on board that you hated me with a vengeance."

"Ah," said the Doctor, and thought about this for a moment. "Well, that was probably just preventative measures. Can't be too careful when you're a vulnerable little female, can you?" She frowned. "Or is that sexist? I rather think it is. Never mind, I take it back. I probably did hate you. But listen— I've changed. Not so much of a hater, me!" She tapped herself on the chest, then lurched back to hold onto the desk before she fell down. "But I've still got to stop you. Now. Where'd you put the camera with all the fiddly bits?" She walked herself around the desk, holding onto it, looking for the biomat, and discovered it quickly in the bottom drawer while next to her Prosser lunged at his bonds, grinding his teeth.

The foreman tried to unhook the straps that held him in, and a computerized voice cut in, female and cool and warning.

"Please do not attempt to get up. We are about to crash. I repeat, we are about to crash."

The Doctor glanced up at him and chuckled as she watched Prosser try to extricate himself from the confines of his chair.

"Well, I'm not a hater," she confided, "but I am a little bit vindictive. Cheers!"

She let go of the desk to salute him, and fell over backwards in the turbulence.

* * *

Rose, still attached to the arm of the Doctor's body, arrived at the shipyard to find the Decatur already well and truly crashed. The ship was listing, practically lolling on the ground on the left side, while the right was still held up by the landing gear, although it was visibly shaking under the strain. There was the groan of tortured metal, the screams of terrified passengers, the distant mechanical whir of wind-up sirens on the horse-drawn emergency wagons. Rose took it all in, fascinated. The Doctor's face looked faintly nauseated; Alice, taken aback by the devastation in front of him, muttered under his breath, "There, but for the grace of God, go I."

Rose was clinging pretty tightly, however, and heard him. She looked up at him immediately.

"What's that mean?"

Alice looked guilty. Curse this Doctor! A pox on this face! Did it have to reflect every emotion it felt as soon as it felt it? He felt rather undone and naked, all his motivations stuck up there, verily like being posted on a six-foot pole, for all the world to see.

"Er, well," he began, haltingly, "could happen to anyone, crashing, couldn't it?"

"I expect it's happened to you a lot," said Rose, sounding resigned and turning back to survey the wreckage.

"Yes," said Alice. "Yes, it has."

They walked towards the smoking ship— or rather, Rose walked towards it, and Alice was dragged behind in her wake.

"We should help people get out of there," Rose said, worriedly. "Suppose it 'splodes? It's a big ship, could be thousands of people in there."

"The gangplank's melted shut," pointed out Alice, who didn't particularly feel like mounting a rescue effort. "And anyway, help's on the way. We might as well scoot for all the good we're doing."

Rose examined the area of the gangplank and had to admit the truth of that.

"But just over there," she said, suddenly, moving further over to the listing left side of the vessel. "It looks like there's some sort of opening—"

It had, in fact, been an escape pod which had figured largely in Alice's plan for leaving the ship. He rolled his eyes as he was pulled over towards it. The pod was gone now, of course, and there remained only the hatchway, which had to be opened from the inside. Did this Rose know nothing about anything? Most likely she relied on the Doctor to tell her what to do, Alice thought, a bit viciously. Silly little human. It wasn't like they could get the hatchway open and actually help anyone inside the wounded ship—

There was a banging on the hatch, and a sort of fizzing and sparking, and it unfurled itself at last and a small body fell out, one foot having got stuck on the hatchway threshold, the rest of the body giving in to gravity and landing full-length on the ground with a faceful of dirt.

"Blimey," it muttered to the ground. "Ouch."

Rose tried to rush over, but was hindered by the fact that she was still latched onto the Doctor's arm, and Alice refused to move.

"Poor thing!" Rose called, tugging on the sleeve of the Doctor's suit jacket. "Hold on a minute." She turned to glance up at him. "What's wrong with you? We should go help."

"Go right ahead," said Alice, refusing to look at her and gazing steadfastly at his former body, which was now struggling to right itself and extricate its foot from the hatch. Rose sighed in deep frustration and turned back to the girl, who was now back on her feet— or rather, on one of them, holding the other and hopping up and down as she tried to examine her injured ankle.

"Ouch ouch," she said. "Ouch." She set her foot back down and looked up just as Rose turned the Doctor's arm loose.

Alice's gaze met the Doctor's, and neither of them much liked what they saw.

Alice turned and ran.

"Doctor!" Rose yelled after him.

"No, wait!" yelped the Doctor herself, took a wobbly step forward and promptly fell over again. "Crashing a ship certainly buggers up your balance," she muttered to the ground. Rose helpfully rolled her over and assisted her to sit up, which she did, now beaming at Rose happily.

"Knew you'd come through alright! I said to myself, That Rose Tyler, she'll come through just fine, leave it to her! I have trained her well, I said. Only worried about you a little." She made a face. "Well, only as much as I needed to. Maybe a little bit more than I should have, come to think of it. After all you were never in any real danger, were you? Or were you?" She looked Rose up and down. "You look alright to me. Though who knows what horrible psychological mind games he's put you through."

Rose smiled at her worriedly. "Are you alright? There's help on the way. Only I should really go after my friend— he's been a bit out of his head and I'm afraid if I let him on his own—"

"Your friend?" repeated the Doctor, incredulously. "Your— well, I should say he's been a bit out of his head! He's in mine! Or, rather, I'm stuck in this one! Look at me, Rose." She waggled her fingers at her companion. "See anything familiar?"

Rose looked at her thoughtfully. "You were— you were the girl that took the picture of us, yeah? We saw you just yesterday."

The Doctor rolled her eyes. "Well, I was the girl, yes, but I'm not now. I mean, I'm still a girl, I agree, but for all that and for the purposes of this conversation can we begin to refer to me as a male of the species once again? I've gotten a bit too much in touch with my feminine side as it is. And that's male of the Time Lord species, I'll have you know, a bright and strapping Gallifreyan if you please."

"What—" said Rose, and shook her head. "I'm sorry, I don't understand what you mean."

"Simple! I'm the Doctor."

Rose sat down quite suddenly.

"You're— the Doctor—?"

"Hello!" She waved at her again and grinned. Rose stared in bafflement, then quite suddenly put her hands over her face.

"Not sure I can cope with this—" she muttered.

"Come on, then!" said the Doctor, bouncing upright again, and winced once more and shook her foot out. "We'd better get moving. If I'm still here when ol' whatsisface extricates himself from the wreckage, I'll be deep in again and who knows what he might do this time. Tie me up and hit me with a fish. Come on." She gestured impatiently to Rose, who staggered up from the ground and followed her.

"But you can't be the Doctor," said Rose, who was trying her best to understand. "I mean, I know the Doctor, and he doesn't look anything like you."

"It was a biological transmat thingie— a biomat. Named it myself." The Doctor grinned proudly and unwound her hair from around her throat where it had gotten tangled in the haste of escape. "Remember this camera?" She held it up and waggled it around.

"Yeah, you took a picture of us with it. I'd—" Rose took two steps together to catch up with the quickly walking young woman. "I'd like a copy of that, actually, don't think I've got any pictures."

"No? Nor do I. Never really thought of myself as the photogenic type, really, though as I'm still getting used to the new body—" the Doctor paused. "Well, and now this one."

Rose shook her head. "I'm sorry, I just— I'm having a little trouble taking this in, and I'm not sure I believe you."

The Doctor swung around and stared up at her companion, somewhat taken aback. "Was he that good, then?" She squinted at her. "Rose, why are you blushing?"

"I'm not," said Rose, who was.

"Yes you are, you're— never mind." The Doctor started forwards again, full of purpose and vigor. "We've got to get to the mayor, and explain what's going on, and why we've crashed a ship on purpose, and then we can get at the Mine officials and tell them what's what." She nodded decisively to herself. "Yes, that's a plan. That's a good plan. I like that plan."

"But I don't know what's going on," said Rose plaintively.

"Good thing you've got me back, then!" the Doctor tossed over her shoulder.


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter Eight**

The Doctor did her level best to explain to Rose on the way over, but Rose was mostly doing a lot of shaking her head and muttering.

"So the mine needed another form of energy in order to keep going, and what do they do? Decide to steal a sun. Brilliant, in a way, really, but can't be allowed, of course. Sun-stealers." The Doctor sniffed abruptly. "What will they think of next?"

"Mutter," said Rose, under her breath.

"And of course that's why everything's gone all pear shaped here on Second Plight— for the record, Rose, if it ever comes up, I hate pears. Not sure why, something about the texture, like eating a fruit that's been dipped in sand. Not particularly smooth on the tongue. I used to like pears, I think, the third me, maybe, could occasionally stomach them, but as life goes on you lose your patience for things like that, and there's just not a lot of point wasting time with a fruit that makes you go _Eeaugh_." She made a face. "Anyway, not to get off the subject, but I thought you should know."

"Mutter," muttered Rose. The Doctor glanced at her sharply.

"You alright?"

"Of course I'm alright," said Rose, spreading her arms dramatically and then dropping them back down by her sides. "I'm walking with a girl who claims to be the Doctor, while the man I thought was the Doctor has gone off, who knows, somewhere, and here we are, saving a sun from being stolen."

"I should think the saving the sun part, if nothing else, would prove who I am," said the Doctor, still slightly injured by Rose's hesitance to put faith in her.

"It's not just that, though," said Rose, mournfully.

"What? What is it?"

Rose sighed. "This really isn't the time to talk about it. I'll tell you later, when it's all sorted out. Where are we going again?"

The Doctor swung round to face her companion, and looked her firmly in the eye. "Focus, Rose. We're going to get everything sorted, I promise you. We'll save these people, put things to rights, and then I'll find a way to get my body back and we'll go on as we were. I promise you. Alright?"

Rose stared down at the young woman, so unfamiliar yet speaking this way, this markedly Doctor-like way. She swallowed hard, and nodded.

"Let's do our best, anyhow," she said.

The Doctor beamed at her.

"Cautious optimism! That's my girl."

Rose was confused. This wasn't unusual; her whole life since she'd met and taken up with the Doctor had been a series of confusions of varying degrees. But this was different in a worryingly immediate way. If this wasn't the Doctor, then the real Doctor was wandering around somewhere without Rose to look after him, and if this was the Doctor, then a., _the Doctor was a girl _and b., _who on earth had Rose been snogging last night_?

Perhaps it wasn't just confusion. Perhaps the confusion was so potent because of the healthy dose of embarrassment mixed in.

* * *

"Right!" said the Doctor, to the first person who would listen, and illustrated everything she said with her wildly gesticulating hands. "Here's the way it is. They've been stealing your sun, which is why all the bonkers weather and whatnot has been going on, and possibly the only way to get them to stop is to lodge a formal complaint, which is bound to be drawn out and painfully legal. Luckily I've had the enormous foresight and intelligence to crash their tractor beam beyond repair. Well," she amended, "beyond easy repair. Well, if they get _right_ on it, they'll probably be able to— never mind. Not important right now. What's important is this. We've got to bring this situation to the attention of everyone we can. Raise a stink about it, make a big fuss." She paused. "Or is it the other way round? Raise a fuss, make— never mind again. This is what I suggest— video conferencing!" She beamed at the crowd of people who were now standing around her, watching open mouthed. "I don't suppose anyone's related to the editors of the bigger newspapers on Tel-Athra, are they?"

The little man from Second Plight's own small newspaper raised a tentative hand.

"Out of curiosity," he said, haltingly, "has this anything to do with the man who was investigating weather?"

The Doctor turned to him brightly. "Yes! That's me! Hello!" She shook his hand, grinning, then dropped it abruptly and shook her head. "Or rather, that was me, and will be me. Not actually me at this moment, however. Right! You've got friends in high places, have you?"

The newsman allowed that he did.

The Doctor beamed like a small female sun.

"I'd get busy calling them," she advised. "You're all going to do a spot of press-conferencing."

Nobody really understood what she was on about, Rose thought, looking around at all the faces; but it was ridiculously easy to get them excited about it anyway. That's what the Doctor counts on, she reckoned to herself, eyeing the young woman with increasing suspicion. Excitement. Crowd action. All they needed were pitchforks and torches and they'd be a mob. Marvelous.

She began, slowly and against her will, to be convinced.

* * *

The technology for the Doctor's plan was not to be found on the backwater planet of Second Plight, and so she returned to the TARDIS for backup and adjustments. The second she stepped in, the TARDIS gave a welcoming hum, the glowing lights of the central console brightening, the entire interior pulsating with delight. The Doctor stood and grinned at her ship for a moment, then strode forward, laying a fond hand on the console.

"She didn't like you," said Rose from just inside the door.

The Doctor turned a questioning glance on her companion.

"I mean, when we came back here, for the night." Rose swallowed. "The TARDIS made a strange noise, and when you tried to touch her, she sparked at you."

"The TARDIS is quite intelligent about things," said the Doctor delicately, managing to convey the thought that Rose, perhaps, wasn't. Rose flinched.

"But I asked you questions," she said, near tears, "and you seemed to know what I was talking about, for the most part. And— you looked right."

"The way I used to look?" questioned the Doctor softly. She hit a series of buttons on the console, and obediently the TARDIS set the hologram image of Emergency Programme One directly between them: the Doctor's previous regeneration, tall and solid in a leather jacket, grave and lonely. The hologram began to speak. The Doctor quickly hit the mute.

Rose shook her head.

"You shouldn't come to rely on things like looks," the Doctor told her seriously. "They can fool you, every time. Think of when we were on New Earth— and Cassandra was in my body."

"But I knew then," said Rose, blushing again. She'd thought an awful lot about when they were on New Earth, and didn't need any particular incentive. "I mean, I knew anyway, but I could tell. You were so different. You were Cassandra. Now, though— you're still you, I think, but something's gone wrong."

The Doctor regarded her seriously for a moment, then relaxed into a fond grin. Striding forwards and looking up into Rose's eyes, she took her companion's hand.

"Rose Tyler," she declared, "I believe you miss me."

Rose wouldn't say yes, and she couldn't say no.

"Well," said the Doctor, "I'm standing right here."

* * *

She landed the TARDIS in the shipyard, deftly, with her usual skill and without the usual fumbling to get it faced the right way or landed in the right time period. The TARDIS behaved as though glad to be shifted, glad to be helmed again, and even had a kind hum for Rose as she stepped through the door and back out into the dimming sunlight of Second Plight.

The night shift was coming on again, and as the Doctor looked around at the expectant faces of Second Plight's inhabitants, she became imbued with a sense of purpose, of righteous ire. She hooked up the vidscreen with a particularly vicious jab, and stood back, arms swinging, to watch the face of a man filter through the static and appear on the screen.

He was in midsentence, and looked all kinds of surprised at suddenly being confronted with a young woman glaring at him, backed by about a hundred other people, also glaring at him. The Doctor had, more or less, been able to explain. The people of Second Plight were angry.

"What the—"

"Halben Turant, Director of Amenities?" prompted the Doctor. "I'm asking not because I don't know, because I do, but because I want everyone else—" She waggled a thumb over her shoulder at the crowd, "— to know who you are as well. Know you by name."

"That's me," said the man, brow furrowing, "but how—"

"Oh, yeah, sorry," said the Doctor, and this time waved a hand at the TARDIS, which was standing too far off to the side for the Director to see it. This merely confused the Director more. "I've hijacked your signal. I understand you were in the process of talking to your foreman, a Mr. Prosser?" She gestured again to the side, imperatively this time, and two of the Mayor's men conducted Prosser towards her. Prosser's face was thrust briefly in front of the vidscreen, teeth bared, looking rabid, and then hauled off again. "He's been very helpful," said the Doctor, with rather opaque inflection. The Director began to look quite incensed.

"I'm given to understand there's been a— glitch in one of our operations," he started.

"Bit more than a glitch," said the Doctor. "Are you aware, Mr. Director, that in pulling the sun off course you're interfering with the normal course of things here on Second Plight in quite a big way? In fact, do you realize that because of the loss of their sunlight, as their solar star orbits farther and farther away, as their planet turns ever faster, as gravity grows ever denser, they lose their time? They lose their lives?"

The Director began to bluster, haphazardly, but he was startled and taken aback and nothing came out with any clarity.

"And are you aware," the Doctor thundered, fists clenched, "that shortly you will be responsible for the hundreds of premature deaths that result from your selfishness, your greed?"

"This is nonsense," said the Director at last, and reached for the End Transmission button. The Doctor leapt at her own vidscreen and fiddled with it; just as the picture started to fade, she caught it and brought it back.

This did not make the Director any happier.

"This is nonsense!" he repeated. "Absolute nonsense, and slander to boot! Who are you, anyway? Why should I listen to you?"

"I'm the Doctor," said the Doctor, standing as tall as she could, noticing nothing about her body now but only inhabiting her own mind, using it, feeling her will radiate like an aura. This was what it was like, regardless of which regeneration she inhabited: this was what it all came down to. Being the Doctor. "And you'll listen to me because I _know_. I've been reached out to, across the stars, by the souls of all these beings. They're circling fast down the drain, ending lives, because you've taken them. And tell me— did you know?" She paused; the Director didn't answer; she shouted. "DID— YOU— _KNOW_?"

The Director's face twitched.

"Preliminary reports were inconclusive," he said at last.

The Doctor fought to control her breathing; it was getting away from her. Rose watched her from the sidelines, holding onto the edge of the TARDIS, and felt that she was going to faint. There wasn't as much air in that smaller pair of lungs as the Doctor was used to.

"But yes," said the Director, heavily, "we knew."

There was a pregnant pause.

"Right!" said the Doctor, brightly. "That's really all I wanted to know." She fiddled again with the vidscreen, wishing wildly for her sonic screwdriver so she wouldn't have to be quite so hands on— the screwdriver made her look a lot more dashing, she thought randomly, like she could change things with a thought and a pointed finger.

Well. She could, anyway.

On the Director's vidscreen appeared a series of other faces: other screens linked into the network, a conference call. Faces from every major newspaper in that galaxy as well as the next one over. The situation having been explained previously, shock registered on each, as well as the typical journalist's desire to spread the story.

Some of the faces were those of environmentalists, who began to check their guns for real working bullets.

Calls began chiming in from all corners of the galaxy. The Director could practically see the stock plummeting. His face fell along with it.

He wasn't going to say, "What do you want me to do?" however, but the Doctor told him anyway.

"We— well, I say we, I mean I— I've wrecked your ship, but they'll have it up and running shortly. You will give orders to begin bringing the sun back. I expect it back in the exact position it was in before you messed about with it, too. I'll be checking up on it in seven years, and if everything's not square, I'll be back here," she stabbed her finger towards the ground, "here and now, and see that you fix it from the beginning." She grinned at the Director's bemused stare, but it was a hollow sort of grin, a grim one. "Don't bother to ask how. Just know that it will be done."

The Director looked at the young woman staring at him with such determination, looked also at the faces crowded around her, glaring at him with wounded, aging eyes; looked to his com-console which was lighting up from all the calls on hold, and heaved a sigh.

"It will be done," he said heavily.

"Now apologize—" started the Doctor, but the Director had already ended transmission. This time, she let him go, and turned her attention to the crowd around her, who were murmuring amongst themselves, comparing times and ages. Rose came over to the Doctor's side just in time to hear her mutter, "They didn't know."

"They didn't know what?"

"That this was happening. They didn't even realize. They knew something was wrong, but not what it was or how to fix it. They were without recourse. They—" The Doctor's voice broke, and she swallowed, and shook her head, wiping at her eyes. "A pox on female hormones!"

Rose tried to catch the giggle before it turned into a laugh, and was marginally successful; but had to cover her mouth with her hand and not respond. The Doctor was busy anyhow.

"I'm sorry," she said, loudly, to everyone, both hands in the air placatingly, as though they were going to turn on her. "I can see the realization on your faces, and I know what a shock this must be— to suddenly have lost so many years. So many of your tomorrows are gone— and I can't give them back to you. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

"But," said a voice from the crowd, and Adabade the farmer walked out to stare at her. "You saved us. Didn't you?"

"They're bringing our sun back," said another.

"Things will go back to the way they were," chimed in a third.

"You saved us," repeated Adabade, and smiled a charming, crooked, old-man's smile. "You saved us, young lady."

The Doctor started visibly, and began to grin back.

"Wellll," she drawled, attempting to shove her hands in her pockets and once again being frustrated in this endeavor, "I did, didn't I?" The grin reached full force. "Ovaries and all. Tell you what— I think this actually went much more smoothly than it would have, had I not been all female and whatnot. Wouldn't have been abducted onboard the ship, for one thing—"

"Don't know what you mean," said Adabade, "but I can tell you're very proud."

The Doctor threw back her head and laughed, and spread her arms wide, and waited; but no one ran into them. She opened her eyes after a moment and looked about her, confused.

Rose was standing behind her, covering her smirk with her hand. The giggle had escaped her, however, and the Doctor turned towards her now, hands on her hips.

"Oi, Rose Tyler! Are you laughing at me?"

"Nope, not at all," said Rose, grinning, "Doctor."

The Doctor relaxed, grinned back. "So I'm the Doctor again, am I?"

"No complaints from me," said Rose softly. They'd had this exchange before, when the Doctor was newly regenerated and had spent the day in bed, with striped pajamas and a teddy bear, arising only to defeat the Sycorax and save the planet. Always convincing her of his own innate marvelousness, the Doctor was.

She opened her arms again, and Rose went into them, holding the young woman close. Muffled against her shoulder, she felt the Doctor begin to laugh. She held tighter, but that only made the smaller woman laugh harder. At last, somewhat exasperated, she let go, and the Doctor spun away from her, arms crossed over her chest.

"That _tickles_!"

Rose was utterly distracted from the odd thing she'd noticed about the body the Doctor was inhabiting by the sudden urge to roll her eyes.

* * *

"Told you we'd find me."

"You make yourself sound like a lost dog."

"Oi! I had to convince you not to go around calling it— 'Doctor, Doctor! Where are you Doctor!' Plain give us away, I said, and was I right or was I right?"

"Oh, you're always right." Rose sounded rather disgruntled, but she was too pleased at the sight in front of her to complain about the Doctor's constant correctness. They stood together and regarded the body at the end of the alley, knee deep in various Second Plight discards.

"Whereas I," said the Doctor, "knew enough to say, 'If I were an alien who'd stolen the body of a Time Lord, where would I be?' And here I am." She regarded her body with distaste. "You're ruining my suit."

Alice stood up slowly, and stretched to his full height, lifting his chin. He stood impassively for a moment, then broke down and swiped wildly at his nose.

"Just let me leave," he begged. "I don't want this body any more, you can have it— just give me another one and let me be on my way and everything'll be— everything'll— ev—" He gave vent to an enormous sneeze.

"Sounds like a volcano went off in your nose," said Rose, fascinated despite herself. The Doctor winced.

"I could feel that one from all the way over here," she complained. "You're ruining my nasal passages, they're going to be _huge_ by the time I get them back. That's what you get, anyway, for taking a body that doesn't belong to you. Right." She turned to Rose. "Hold on to me."

Rose looped her arm through the Doctor's, grinning down at her.

"I can't wait till you're you again," she told her.

"I'll be with you momentarily," the Doctor promised, and faced Alice again, raising the biomat to a level height in front of her. "Say cheese."

There was a brilliant flash of light.


	9. Chapter 9

**A/N: Well, here it is! Thanks for reading and reviewing, you've all been great!**

**Chapter Nine**

"Well," said the Doctor, with a sniff, twitching his nose to one side, "that was— something."

Rose grinned and then laughed, abruptly. "Yeah. Something, it definitely was."

"Somewhere, your grammar teacher is spinning in her grave," the Doctor informed her with a wry sideways glance. He patted himself down absently, checking that the front of his suit was flat again. Rose watched him, amused.

"You handled it better than I thought you would," she observed, and the Doctor looked up at her with a sudden bright grin.

"Being the female of the species? I rather enjoyed it. Wouldn't do me much good in the long run, of course. Maybe if I was taller." His companion rolled her eyes. "What?"

"You did just fine as you were," she reminded him. "Saved the planet, didn't you? You're always doin' that. Mind you, I wish I'd been there for your first moments."

"Would have been a lot less confusing for you if you had."

"I can just imagine the look on your face! Going to stand up and wondering why you're not getting any taller."

"That was really the least of my problems," the Doctor admitted, on second thought.

"'New breasts,'" said Rose, in a fairly credible imitation, "'that's weird.'"

The Doctor made a sound somewhere between a choke and a snort. It sounded painful, and was. He grabbed at his nose. "Gah! What did that body thief do to me? Nasal passages are all inflamed, it'll be weeks before I'm back to normal again—"

"Great," said Rose, "you can use it as an excuse for your snoring."

"I do _not_ snore," the Doctor said definitely. "I— sleep-mutter."

Rose couldn't help herself any longer, and threw her arms around that familiar, rail-thin, gangly body, now occupied by its rightful owner once more. "I think I missed you," she said into his suit jacket.

"But you didn't know I was gone."

"I missed you anyway." She held him tighter, closer. It was, as usual, like hugging a very friendly coat hanger. The Doctor relaxed, directed a grin into her hair, and reciprocated. They stood still for a time, and then Rose let go at last and stepped away, smiling, wiping at her eyes. The Doctor raised his eyebrows. "Female hormones," Rose excused herself, snidely. The Doctor grinned.

"I know just the thing for that. Tea!"

* * *

The TARDIS spun in flight, a thing of beauty and a joy forever, as the Doctor described it. They were on their way seven years in the future, by which time the sun should have been back in its proper place, shining in the sky over Second Plight, but, as the Doctor pointed out, there was no hurry. They had the time.

"What do you suppose they'll do now?"

The Doctor shrugged, and picked up his cup. "I expect they'll let things go back to normal. Very laid-back, Second Plight. Apart from the laws about not shooting ducks unless they belong to you, that is. Did I ever tell you about— yes, I can see from the look on your face that I have. Never mind. Yes, I expect that things will very shortly go on as they used to— planting and growing, eating and sleeping, living and loving."

"You did so much for them," said Rose, her voice suddenly husky with hidden thoughts. The Doctor glanced at her sharply, then just as quickly looked away.

"I couldn't fix it all." His own voice, his own blessed sometimes-squeaky Brit-inflected voice, was regretful. "Couldn't give them back all that time they've had taken away from them—"

"But they know, now," Rose pointed out. She looked up at him, her chin leant in her hand, hair falling all to one side, and the Doctor drank the sight of her in, so normal, so _her_. Sitting there perched in his kitchen chair at his kitchen table, looking back at him and trying to make things better. "They know what they missed, and they won't let it go by again. They'll use every day like it was their last, because now they know how quickly it gets away from you."

"And that's better," said the Doctor. It wasn't a question, but rather a fact. It was undoubtedly better that way, to live in the moment, to seize the day, carpe diem— "A life is a terrible thing to waste."

He glanced back at Rose, who was looking at him with undeniable meaning in her eyes, and suddenly he got that they weren't really talking about Second Plight anymore. They were talking about something that he didn't, in particular, want to talk about. And he was, all unknowing, saying exactly what she secretly wanted to hear.

Perhaps it was the hormones, but he steeled himself.

"Rose, you've been trying to ask me about something for some time now." He paused, and she could see him struggling with himself; all his instincts were to toss off some flip remark, and it was difficult for him to take this seriously, but he was trying for her, and she appreciated it deeply. She didn't realize she was gripping his hand tightly till his fingers twisted and then twined in hers. "The floor's yours," he said at last.

Rose took a deep breath, and hesitated.

This would have been much easier if she hadn't already just had this conversation with him. Of course, it wasn't actually him at the time— but she'd thought it was, and this felt like nothing more than a replay.

She could do it some other time, then, when the feeling had worn off. There was a time and place for everything. She shook her head at him, mutely. The Doctor grinned in relief.

"Can't believe it of you! Passing up an opportunity like that!"

"I know," she said. "You actually give me a chance to get a word in edgewise, and I can't think of what to say."

His grin faltered a little, and he said, tentatively, "Rose, how did he convince you that he was me, anyway?"

That was exactly where she didn't want the conversation to go. She put her hands to her face to cover the blush that arose anytime she thought of herself, delighted at the sudden turn their relationship seemed to have taken, threading her fingers through the Doctor's hair, standing on her tiptoes to get closer to him while simultaneously pulling him down— and it wasn't him at all. He was, as a matter of fact, watching her with his mouth slightly open in a small round O, a look of calculation on his face.

"If you're thinking of reading my brain, you can just forget it," she snapped at him.

He shook himself. "Sorry! No. Was just—" A pause to swallow, collect himself. "Thinking."

They sat together for a while in a rather uncomfortable silence, before Rose aroused herself from an embarrassed stupor and said, "So where are we going?"

"Quick stop into the future of Second Plight, check on them, make sure everything's okay— then we'll head off into the wild blue yonder. Try to find out who Alice, back there—" the Doctor jerked a thumb over his shoulder. They'd found Alice the closest thing to a cell the TARDIS had— a roomy cage in the largest of the "outside" courtyards, the TARDIS ceiling soaring tall and blue overhead to mimic the sky. It was easily large enough to be a house and was the only door inside the TARDIS that actually locked properly. It had been built, the Doctor said, conducting Alice into it, for a family of endangered Translucent Monkeys that he'd picked up for their own protection.

"Actually," he'd said, frowning a bit vaguely into the cage as he shut and locked the door with a rusty key on a heavy chain which he produced from his pocket, "they might still be in there. Somewhere. Bit hard to tell."

Now, he continued, "—try to find out who she stole that body from, and return it." He glanced at the biomat, which lay quietly on the table between them. He heaved a sigh. "I'll have to go talk to her— it— and see what I can find out. We're going to need some degree of cooperation."

"How are you going to get that?" Rose wanted to know.

The Doctor sniffed. "Rewards for good behavior— like freedom, eventually. And punishment for bad."

"Like making her switch bodies with you again," suggested Rose with a grin.

"I was thinking tickling," admitted the Doctor. "Or I've got one of those lovely faux-guns that when you pull the trigger a little flag pops out that says 'Bang!'"

"Maybe a water pistol."

"Maybe a water pistol," he agreed, and they shared a smile like partners in crime, like crooks on the run, like the twin architects of a singularly dastardly plan. Rose straightened.

"I've just remembered! Doctor, when you were her, and I hugged you, there was somethin' odd about it."

"Yes, I know," murmured the Doctor, scratching reflexively just beneath his collarbone. "I _said_ it was ticklish, didn't I?"

"No, I mean, something else. Same—" she floundered a bit. "Same general region, but— it felt like there was more than one heartbeat."

He blinked. "What?"

"More than one," Rose went on, slowly. "I'm almost sure of it. It felt like— she had two hearts." She looked at him sharply, not quite sure of what this meant. "Did you not feel it, when you were her?"

"I—" said the Doctor, and fell to furiously pondering. The fact was, he hadn't noticed much about the heartbeats of the young woman when he'd been her, but surely if it had been different he would have— if it had been different—

He stood up so quickly he knocked his chair over backwards.

"I'll just go and— er— I'll be back, uh— shortly," he said, and then he was gone.

Rose sat for a moment or two, and then began quietly to gather up the tea things.

* * *

The Doctor burst into the courtyard and strode masterfully towards the cage, wherein Alice sat, looking quite comfortable. She'd been given a good tea as well, earlier, and wasn't feeling too badly about things. The look on the Doctor's face, however, indicated that there might be a change on the way.

He stopped just outside the door and stood with his arms swinging by his sides, shoulders forwards, eyes narrowed and intent. Alice stood and came to the bars of the cage, taking hold with both hands and leaning into them.

"Come to let me out yet?"

"Not just yet," said the Doctor, darkly. "Something's got to be settled first."

"And what would that be? Apologies? Remonstrations?"

"Hold still," he commanded her, and he put one hand through the bars and held it to her body, the left side of her chest and then the right. His breath came faster; and so did Alice's, it must be noted. He lifted his hand away from her almost immediately. "It's true then."

"The heartbeats? Yeah. Noticed those. Odd, isn't it?"

He pointed a finger at her like a dagger, and fixed her gaze with his dark eyes. "Who does that body belong to?"

"Me," said Alice with a grin. "I mean, possession is nine tenths of the law, isn't it, and—"

"No. No." The Doctor shook his head. "You will not play games with me. You will give me a straight answer because— because I _need_ to know. Who did you take it from? Who does it belong to? _Who_?"

Alice stared at him, doing her level best to take his measure. That he was serious was easy to tell. That he would follow up, should she choose to ignore or lie to him, was beginning to become clear. She'd spent time in that body, and although it was without his consciousness, it was alien in very specific ways. It _remembered_ taking action. It _remembered_ doing the right thing. It was difficult to steer for someone like her, a dishonest thief like her, because it _knew_.

It had more in common with this young woman's body than just the two hearts.

She said, "The girl told me it was a new body, a starter, a fixer-upper, and she wasn't quite used to it yet. She told me it was too long a name to bother with and I'd never get it down. But it started with an R."

The Doctor went very still.

"She asked me to call her Fred," said Alice blithely. "For old times' sake."

* * *

"But," said Rose, staring at him from over the table. He was still immensely preoccupied, brooding, wrapped in his own head and rather inaccessible to her. "But— you said they were gone, the Time Lords. You said you were the last one."

"I realize that," said the Doctor at last, and his tone was kindly, if detached. He remained staring at the ornately tiled kitchen floor. One of the tiles was cracked, had been for hundreds of years. If he remembered correctly it was where the third prime minister had a panic attack when she found out the Doctor didn't have any pickles in his fridge. That was a long, a very long time ago. He remembered that he was talking to Rose, and found the rest of his sentences and sent them out, in a steady stream, hoping they made sense to someone. "But she had gone to a parallel universe— L-space. And though it was a war through time and space, all space, if she'd been transferred— if her mind was in another body, then she would be saved. And if this body wasn't fully occupied by a Time Lord, it too would be safe. It must be a new regeneration," he mused to himself, folding his arms and thinking about what Romana must have looked like, peering out from behind those eyes. "She didn't look anything like that the last time I saw her. Then again— I've changed a few times myself."

"And does she know where she is? Alice, I mean? Does Alice remember where she left her?"

The Doctor sighed deeply. "It's going to be a hard bargain to drive. But I think I can manage it."

"What does she want?" asked Rose quietly. The Doctor shrugged.

"What do any of us want? Freedom. I told her I'd find her a body— when we find Romana, and give her her's back."

Rose sat forward. "We're going to find her, then?"

The Doctor suddenly became a lot less still. He turned his face towards Rose, and broke into an enormous beaming grin, his eyes lighting. She grinned back, because she couldn't help herself, and was reminded again that no matter what he looked like, it was always _him_. It was always the Doctor: tall or short, broad or narrow, old or young, male or female.

He gripped her hand.

"We're going to find her," he said, and though it was out loud, it was a promise to himself. She was out there somewhere, was his beautiful brilliant Romana, regardless of what she looked like, and she was just waiting for him. And Rose— Rose looked at him with utter trust, something he felt he could never get enough of. She looked at him like she was waiting for him to do something bigger than just save a world— something larger, more powerful, and infinitely harder.

But she, too, was content to wait.

They had the time. It was all in front of them.

The TARDIS, inspired, moved forwards.


End file.
